In an Emergency Room (ER), triage nurses assess everyone who comes in. They assign them a priority level, usually one through five. Someone having a heart attack is a one and gets seen immediately. Someone with a sprained ankle is a five and they must wait.
For them, it's never about who arrived first or who complains the loudest. It's pure risk assessment. Who's most likely to die if they don't act now? This means some people wait hours for relatively minor issues while others go straight to the back room. That's how the system works. And in this system, they accept that resources are limited. So they make hard calls about where they'll do the most good.
Accessibility is like triage.
Instead of trying to make everything accessible, you triage and tackle what matters most first. Which pages get the most traffic? Where are users actually trying to complete tasks? That's where you start.
IT security teams already work this way. They protect the vital stuff first, not every single thing on a server. They know breaches can happen, so they protect what matters most first.
Accessibility can and should work the same way.
You focus on your main user flows, your conversion paths, first. You work on those and make sure they're tight. Done? Okay. What's next?
Let's go back to triage in an ER for a second.
You might think that some people cut in line and those that didn't will just be ignored forever. It doesn't work like that. Even the low-priority patients still get care.
And that's the difference between ER triage and a half-assed accessibility effort. The sprained ankle still gets treated.
That is what most teams get wrong with accessibility. They think triage means that some pages might never get fixed. And that that's an expected and accepted side-effect of the system.
But it's not.
A help page for your customer portal might only get 500 visits a month, but if someone can't access it, they might not be able to pay their bill or manage their account. Same goes for accessibility statements, complaint forms or password reset flows.
Low traffic doesn't mean low impact. If the page exists because someone might need it, then someone who needs it really needs it.
Your job is to make strategic choices instead of either doing nothing or burning out trying to do everything.