Accessibility Is an Engineering Problem

I have family members with vision impairments from past injury. I’ve spent years helping them navigate the web, and that experience gave me a perspective on accessibility that most engineers don’t have - not because they’re incapable, but because they’ve never watched someone they care about struggle with a website that didn’t have to be that hard to use.

Most companies treat accessibility as a compliance checkbox. Run an automated scanner, fix the flagged items, ship it. That catches maybe 30% of actual accessibility problems. The rest - focus management, screen reader announcements, keyboard navigation flow, the experience of actually using the product with assistive technology - requires someone who understands the problem from the inside.

Accessibility is an engineering problem. It’s not a designer problem or a legal problem or a QA problem (though all of those people contribute). It’s about system design: how does information flow through the interface to the user, regardless of how they’re consuming it? That’s the same question you’d ask about API design or data architecture. The medium is different. The discipline is the same.

The companies that get this right don’t have an “accessibility team.” They have engineers who understand that accessibility is a quality attribute of the system, the same way performance and security are. You don’t have a separate “performance team” that bolts speed onto the product after it ships. You build it in from the start. Accessibility works the same way.