It happens in the in-between moments.
You skip a button label because you have a Friday deadline. You flag a colour contrast issue but you park it for next time. You plan to fix the form labels, but those land in the backlog somewhere and never resurface.
Two years later, you're starring at a bunch of complaints and issues from an audit you had to do. Your instinct is to blame complexity. Blame legacy systems. Blame scale. Blame users or the real world.
But those aren't the culprit. It's your decisions that landed you where you now are. I know and you know that you've not made these decisions out of malice. You were in a hurry and you were consistent. Always the same decision to postpone and forget. You wanted to move fast. You moved, but in the wrong direction.
Every time you decided to deprioritise accessibility, you've made a choice. All these small choices quietly stacked up until one day the stack of dominoes fell.
That day is today. And the real world didn't bring the stack down.
The question is what are you going to do about it.