To make meaningful change, you need to remove friction. And you might think accessibility is friction. It's extra work right?
Your developers are already complaining about tech debt. Your designers are stretched thin. Adding accessibility to their plates is friction.
Accessibility feels like that because you've made it an addition instead of a foundation.
When accessibility is something you think about after design, after development, after QA, damn, of course it's friction. It's rework. Oh shit, now we need to go back and fix all these forms!
What if you started thinking about it before everything else? What if your design system already had accessible components? What if your developers were using the right semantic HTML from the start?
It's not friction any more. It's just how you do things.
The friction isn't accessibility. The friction is changing your process.
And I understand that! That change can hit hard. But losing customers because your form doesn't work with a keyboard and spending sprint after sprint fixing accessibility bugs that shouldn't even have existed is harder.
Accessibility feels like extra work because you're retrofitting it. Once it's in your foundation, it disappears into the background.
It becomes the same as any other quality standard. You don't call security "friction." You don't call performance optimisation "extra work."
Accessibility is the same. It's a sign of quality.