Accessibility doesn't fail because the technology is hard. Or because the timeline is tight. Budget also rarely has anything to do with it. Kind of.
It fails because nobody with budget approval wanted it badly enough.
I think that's the real problem. It's a people problem. And you can't solve a people problem with a better checklist.
So what creates the conditions for someone to choose accessibility?
Part of it is making the cost of not choosing it feel real. Yeah, maybe it's legal risk, losing customers or damaging your brand. Fear works, up to a point. But fear only gets you the minimum to avoid getting sued.
You need a deeper shift. And that only happens when people with authority to make decisions personally feel the friction. Empathy is hard to manufacture, but experience isn't.
There's also something about the way we frame accessibility that bothers me. "Accessibility project" sounds like a tax. It's not a project any more than your product is a feature. But when you say you're making it work for everyone, that sounds more like craftsmanship. It's the same work, but a totally different story. And sometimes, maybe, this is the story that makes it into the roadmap.
Maybe the real job isn't convincing people that accessibility matters. Maybe it's building the conditions where not caring starts to feel weird. Socially costly. Out of step with the kind of organisation you want to be seen as.
Ah, but that sounds more like a cultural change. It has nothing to do with technology or timelines or budgets.