Have you ever noticed how Batman is all muscle and no vision? He's just punching his way through Gotham, throwing batarangs, without ever asking why crime keeps happening.
Here you have Bruce Wayne sitting in his mansion without a care in the world and only puts on his bat suit when the little bat signal comes alive. He then goes in fists first and solves that little crisis without giving it a second thought as to why it happened and how to stop it next time.
Bank robbed? Throw the baddies in jail. Hostages taken? Knock out the kidnappers. Poison gas released? Find the antidote. Bridge about to collapse? Hold it up with a grappling hook shot from your Batmobile.
But where's the vision? Where's the after-thought? Where's the plan?
And then you have the Joker.
Now this guy seems like a harmless idiot. Even the name gives him away. To Batman, this guy just seems like he's joking around, causing minor inconveniences left and right, begging to be stopped.
But there's more than meets the eye.
The Joker always has a plan! There's always a vision of a different world that he's trying to create. He has a strategy on how to get there and well defined tactics to support that strategy. And he's not afraid to switch tactics when something doesn't work the way he wanted to.
Batman sees the tactics, but fails to see the vision.
Superheroes rarely have a plan. Their whole existence is based around fighting the most urgent thing the villains throws their way. They have no vision of a different world, except some vague concept of a world without the villains.
I'd rather be a villain. They have a plan and they build the world piece by piece according to that plan.
And you need a plan in accessibility.
Yes, you can fix issues as soon as some customer reports them. But you never permanently solve the problems that way. They'll just spring up later or in a different part of your product. Like a silly game of whack-a-mole.
But if you sit down and think about a vision. How do you see your product in the hands of more people with disabilities? How do you want to handle accessibility as a team going forward? What can you do to make that happen?
Could you write accessibility criteria into user stories from the start? How about adding accessibility acceptance criteria to your definition of done or including people with disabilities in user research and testing? Prioritising accessibility debt in your backlog could be a tactic.
And you build it up from there. The tactics can change. But you always start with a vision.
I don't know, maybe being a superhero is overrated. Batman would make a terrible accessibility advocate.