You fixed keyboard navigation on that form. Great.
You made the focus outline better. Finally. It took three sprints, but you did it.
You added meaningful descriptions to the images. Most of them, anyway.
And the drag and drop with a mouse now has a keyboard alternative.
You couldn't be prouder. Your accessibility score went up. Your audit looks better. That's what they call progress.
You're slowly but surely hacking away at those known issues.
Don't forget about the blind spots though. The unknown issues you can't see yet.
You might not know about the screen reader user who gave up on your checkout flow because your error messages don't announce themselves. Or the person with tremors who can't hit your buttons because your click targets are too small and too close together.
What about the user with ADHD who abandoned your form halfway through because it spans five pages when it could've been one? Or the person with photosensitive epilepsy who closed your site the second that auto-playing carousel started flashing.
They didn't file a ticket. They didn't leave feedback. They just left and you have no idea they were ever there.
The problem is you only know about the people who make it far enough to complain. Everyone else is invisible. They bounced before they even showed up in your analytics as a real user.
You're making incremental improvements to an experience that, for some people, doesn't exist at all.
Maybe that's the most unsettling part. Not the issues you know about. Not even the ones you know about and are actively ignoring.
It's the ones you'll never even hear about. The problems so fundamental that entire groups of people can't even begin to encounter your known issues.
They'll just never get that far.