Accessibility debt usually has a boring beginning.
It's usually one exception, one thing you'll fix "later" or one pattern nobody is fully happy with, but everyone uses because the sprint needs to keep moving.
Nothing dramatic, right?
I never really saw accessibility discussions show up after some big failure or create some giant backlog. It always started as a trade-off. And trade-offs are part of product work. I don't think every shortcut is bad. You always have to make the best decision you can with the time, information and constraints you have.
The problem starts when nobody remembers that the shortcut was supposed to be a shortcut. Then the shortcut turns into how it's always been done. And that's when accessibility becomes debt.
So what is accessibility debt? For now, my working definition is this:
Accessibility debt is future work created by today's accessibility shortcuts.
What bothers me is that it often becomes debt before anyone calls it that. You only see small signals like the same issue appearing across different features or QA writing the same kind of comment on issues again and again.
You keep having the same accessibility conversation, but in different tickets.
That's costly. Why?
Repeated conversation are often a sign that the team does not have a shared answer yet. Or if it does, people don't know where it is, which is kinda like not being there anyway.
When there's no shared answer, every new feature has to pay the cost again. This trumps the cost of one accessibility issue. One issue is negligible. The same issue returning again and again because the team never turned the lesson into a pattern or standard is really the problem.
Before asking how big the accessibility backlog is, I like to ask:
What shortcuts have you started treating as normal?