Your marketing team just pushed a visual refresh live. Hooray! Wait. Now, critical text, like error messages and pricing, is literally invisible to users with low vision or colour blindness.
Ouch. That's an emergency for sure. All hands on deck to fix it. No time for big discussions. You need clear marching orders.
There are times when you need to make a snap call about accessibility and you've got to fix it now. Fair enough.
But most accessibility decisions don't work like that. You've got time to involve your team, talk to users with disabilities and actually think through the implications.
When accessibility issues constantly blindside you, that's a signal. It means your organisation is stuck in reactive mode. You keep putting out fire after fire, just waiting to see where the next one starts. Without ever getting ahead of it. Nobody learns anything because there's never time to understand why something matters or how to prevent it next time.
This reactive cycle is shit for your team and worse for your users. The boss makes a quick decision, the team doesn't develop accessibility skills and the same problems keep surfacing.
The only way out is through. You need to break the cycle. You need to build accessibility thinking into your product process from the start, not as crisis management.