Recently, I've been playing more games as a way to unwind. I'm not much of a gamer. I play games on the lowest difficulty setting. I want to relax not stress that I die all the time.
I like open world games where you can walk around and explore quests. And I always save before a final boss battle. In fact, I feel like there's just one more side quest that I should complete before fighting that guy. Maybe because I know the story ends afterwards. Or maybe I'm scared I won't be up to the task. Ah, if only I had this sword or that spell available...
I've seen people treat accessibility like that.
Like a final boss in a game. They've got to complete every other quest first, level up all their skills, collect all the items and then they'll be ready to fight accessibility.
Gotta finish the redesign first. But you can't do it until you migrate to the new framework. That's a lot of work, so you need to launch this feature before that. Oh, and there's a rebrand coming, so you wait for that too.
And the game never ends.
But in product, that's normal. The game shouldn't end. There is no final level. Roadmaps don't have a finish line where everything's done and you can finally focus on accessibility. There's always another feature, another update, another "quick win" that leadership wants yesterday.
Meanwhile, every new thing you ship without accessibility is another blocker someone has to deal with. You're still telling yourself you'll get to it after this next sprint.
What you actually mean when you say "after everything else" is never. You're just hoping if you delay long enough, people will stop asking.
You know what?
They just might.
But not for the reasons you were hoping for.