Accessibility stopped being optional the moment you sold to enterprise

For most of the last decade, accessibility in commercial software was a values argument. It is now a contractual one. WCAG 2.2 AA appears in enterprise RFPs, EN 301 549 governs European public-sector procurement, and the European Accessibility Act extends obligations to a wide set of consumer services.

The values argument was always the better one. But if the commercial argument is what gets the work funded, use it.

What a retrofit actually involves

We took a mature B2B product from roughly forty per cent conformance to a defensible AA position over one quarter. The distribution of effort surprised everyone involved.

• Around half the failures were colour contrast and focus visibility — mechanical, fixable in days once the design tokens were centralised.
• A quarter were form semantics: inputs without programmatic labels, error messages announced nowhere, required fields communicated only by colour.
• A fifth were keyboard traps and focus management in modals, drawers and custom dropdowns — every one of them a component that reimplemented a native element badly.
• The remainder were genuinely hard: a virtualised data grid and a drag-and-drop planner that needed real redesign, not remediation.

The lesson about custom components

Nearly every difficult failure came from a component that replaced something the platform already provided. A custom select instead of a select. A div with a click handler instead of a button. A bespoke modal instead of a dialog element.

The accessible version of most components is the one the platform already ships. Every reimplementation is a debt you will pay at audit time.

Making it stick

A remediation project fixes a snapshot. Keeping it fixed needs three things in the pipeline: automated axe checks in CI that fail the build rather than warn, a keyboard-only pass in the definition of done for any interactive work, and screen-reader testing on the critical journeys each release. Automated tooling catches perhaps a third of issues — useful, but a floor rather than a ceiling.

The unexpected result: the accessibility work made the product measurably better for everyone. Focus states helped keyboard-heavy power users, form error handling reduced support tickets, and the contrast pass fixed a legibility complaint from a warehouse team working under bad lighting.