Someone asked me this today in a meeting:
What's the best part of working in web accessibility?
My answer surprised the hell out of them. I simply said, when I'm not needed.
What? When no one needs me? That's the best part? Am I just being lazy?
No, not at all.
Think about it.
Why would I not be needed? Because I've already done the hard work of laying the foundations for those around me to operate without much guidance from me.
The designers already know to check their colour contrast before a mockup gets to a developer. The developers reach for semantic HTML first. A button is a button, not a styled div pretending to be one. The QA team has accessibility checks right in their tests.
All this is not by accident. That's months of unglamorous work. Knowledge sharing. PR review comments that explained why instead of just what. That's a lot of documentation that people read because it was written for them. That's one-on-ones where I answered the same question six different ways until it clicked.
There's a version of this job where I become the accessibility gatekeeper. You know, that person every ticket gets routed through. The bottleneck everyone resents. I might feel important, but I know for sure I'm not helping.
My goal was never to make myself indispensable. I'd rather have sprints where nobody pings me. That's what success feels like to me.
So yeah, the best part of working in web accessibility is walking into a meeting where nobody needs to ask me anything, because they already know the answer.