Sometimes, you're having a shitty week. You're working on a terribly boring project. Your client is going out of their way to make your life as difficult as possible. Any suggestions you have or fixes you propose fall on deaf ears.
Your suggested semantic markup or ARIA labels get shot down because they're "too wordy" or "not fancy enough," even though screen reader users need the context those too wordy words provide. The marketing team insists on keeping that auto-playing video with no pause button because "it shows how our page is dynamic" and designers have focus indicators that are barely visible because "it ruins the clean design."
There's the person who keeps saying "blind people don't use our website anyway" and all the keyboard navigation fixes you wanted to make "don't make sense."
To top it all off, you notice the accessibility statement says all is well in wonderland.
It's all messing with your head.
Sometimes it sucks. There's no point in dwelling on that feeling. There's no point in throwing wood in the fire.
That shitty week ends after just seven days. The terribly boring project gets shipped eventually. The client, the designers, the developers, they all fade away eventually.
Maybe change happens slowly. Maybe it's two steps forward, one step back. That sucks. But when you look back at where web accessibility was five years ago versus today, you can't help but smile.
And sometimes, just sometimes, when you do get those suggestions in and those fixes shipped, and you get to make someone's day just a little bit better. Those moments? They make all the shitty weeks worth it.