The things that get cut first tell you who wasn't in the room when the decision was made.
Performance gets cut. No one talked to the engineers. Security gets cut. There's no one on the team who owns it.
Accessibility gets cut.
Ah, but accessibility is different. Performance and security don't survive the cut for long. They get caught before anything ships.
No one wants a slow site because everyone knows it will lose conversions. And security breaches make headlines. Someone will find the money to fix these things quite early.
Accessibility doesn't create that kind of crisis for the people making the decisions. So it stays cut.
The people who rely on screen readers, keyboard navigation or voice control aren't in your sprint planning. They're not in your standups. They're not a senior engineer complaining about load times. They're not a security officer raising a security flag. Their frustration doesn't reach the people with authority to act on it.
That's not an accident. It's just how rooms get built. Meh.
What gets cut isn't what matters least. It's what the people in the room think they don't need themselves.
But others do. Somewhere, someone relies on a keyboard or a screen reader. They were not in the room, so their voices were cut.