I keep hearing accessibility is everyone's responsibility.
I believe that, I think.
But I'm starting to worry that "everyone owns it" can hide some confusion.
I don't think accessibility can belong to any one specialist sitting outside the team, waiting to review things after the important decisions have already been made.
That just feels wrong to me. It's too late, too separate and too easy to ignore until it becomes expensive.
But accessibility also cannot belong to a vague group called "the team" or "everyone."
That feels wrong too, because when a decision needs to be made, "the team" or "everyone" is not a useful answer.
Who decides whether an accessibility issue blocks release? Who notices that a requirement is too unclear before the engineers start writing code? Who can say a design isn't ready because the user journey is messed up? Who decides that the same issue appearing again needs a shared pattern instead of another one-off fix?
My thinking gets a bit messy from here.
I don't think the answer is product, design, engineering or QA owns accessibility.
Maybe accessibility ownership changes depending on the decision.
Product can own the trade-off. Design can own the experience. Engineers can own how stuff is built and QA can own evidence that it works.
So maybe the problem isn't the shared ownership, but the shared ownership without clear decision rights.
Everyone owns accessibility sounds mature.
But if nobody knows who decides, who checks, who escalates and who can say "neah, that's not done," shared responsibility becomes too foggy.
I think that's how we get to rework.