Accessibility is always important in planning meetings.
I've been in more than one meeting where everyone nodded thoughtfully at the mention of accessibility. I think I'm getting through and then someone usually says "we should definitely prioritise this." And my stomach just gets that dreadful sinking feeling. The only thing I've accomplished was to get accessibility shoved into the backlog. The backlog is where things go to die.
And when next sprint rolls around, everyone's like "nah, we've got this button that needs to be two pixels to the left." Maybe next quarter? Nope. Leadership wants a feature that five people mentioned once. How about next year? We're too busy shipping new stuff that's just as broken as the old stuff.
Accessibility is important but not urgent.
Here's the thing about calling something "important but not urgent." If it never becomes urgent, it was never actually important. You just didn't want to say that out loud.
And let's be clear. You're not waiting to ship something. Your release dates don't move. You're shipping constantly. It's what makes it into the releases that you constantly change around. And those important but not urgent things never make the cut.
You know what finally makes accessibility urgent? A lawsuit. A complaint. Being passed over in a tender. A client threatening to quit. Someone important who can't use your product.
Suddenly you've got budget, resources and executive attention. Funny how that works.
Sadly, even then we only do the minimum required. I guess it's better than nothing.
But if something's been rotting in your backlog for over half a year, you've already made your decision. Just own it instead of pretending you'll "get to it eventually."