The most important step you can take when it comes to accessible development has nothing at all to do with the technical aspects of the work. It has to do with your mindset and (perhaps more importantly) the larger team and company mindset when actively prioritizing accessibility in your workflow.

Are you truly prioritizing accessibility?

It may be encouraging to say that you want to improve accessibility in your application or website, but are you truly standing by that statement? When the team is setting deadlines, narrowing down MVPs, and making difficult decisions about project scope, are you genuinely weighing accessibility equally with the more “shippable” features? Be honest in this assessment because, a lot of the time, this is where the commitment to accessibility begins to break down. Is your team willing to delay a launch date when an accessibility-related issue comes up? Are they ready to add hours to a project estimate to ensure that time is made for thorough accessibility testing? Or, when you look at this honestly, is accessibility still being categorized as something second-tier that doesn’t rate the same priority level as the base feature set?

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