There is a predictable lifecycle to most enterprise accessibility initiatives. The organization commits to a standard, usually following a lawsuit or a regulatory shift. Resources are mobilized. An external audit is commissioned. A remediation team fixes the backlog. The site launches with a clean bill of health and a VP’s sign-off.
Six months later, the system is failing again.
This cycle repeats not because the team lacks skill, but because they have misclassified the nature of the problem. They treat accessibility as a project with a completion date. In reality, accessibility is a performance metric that fights a constant war against entropy.
Accessibility often passes audits because audits measure a moment in time. Production systems, however, operate across time, contributors, and pressure. The failure to recognize this distinction is why well-funded, well-intentioned accessibility programs eventually degrade into liability.
The myth of “accessibility done”
In software engineering, we rarely claim that “security is done” or “performance is done.” We recognize these as continuous operational states that require monitoring. Yet, accessibility is frequently tracked as a deliverable, a checkbox on a product roadmap.
This “definition of done” is the first structural failure. When accessibility is framed as a milestone, the budget and attention required to maintain it evaporate the moment the launch is verified.
If accessibility can be “finished,” it can also quietly regress. The moment a system is declared compliant is often the exact moment it begins to decay. New features are shipped without aria-labels. Third-party marketing scripts inject unlabelled iframes. The codebase evolves, but the accessibility governance remains frozen in the pre-launch audit state.
Content velocity is the first point of failure
Most accessibility regressions in a mature product are not introduced by engineers. They are introduced by content creators working under deadline pressure.
In a modern enterprise, the velocity of content publication often outpaces the governance of the CMS. Editors are incentivized to publish quickly. If the CMS allows them to upload an image without alt text, they will. If the WYSIWYG editor permits them to bold a paragraph instead of using a proper H3 tag because “it looks better,” they will.
This is not malicious; it is a user experience failure within the internal tooling. When the system relies on the vigilance of a copywriter to maintain semantic structure, it will fail. Accessibility breaks fastest where governance is weakest, and in most organizations, the gap between the engineering team (who built the accessible templates) and the marketing team (who populates them) is where the erosion begins.
Design systems that encode style but not behavior
We assume that because we have a Design System, accessibility is inherited by default. This is a dangerous assumption. Most design systems are excellent at enforcing visual consistency, colors, spacing, and typography, but poor at enforcing behavioral consistency.
A component in Figma may look like a button, but that does not ensure the coded counterpart handles focus states, keyboard entry, or screen reader announcements correctly. We frequently see design systems where the “variants” drift over time. A product team creates a local instance of a component to solve a specific UI problem, decoupling it from the master system.
When a design system enforces appearance but treats interaction logic as an implementation detail, it creates a “Hollow Component.” It looks compliant on the surface, but lacks the semantic guts required for assistive technology. The intent is accessible; the outcome is not.
Engineering tradeoffs that accumulate quietly
Accessibility debt is rarely the result of a single catastrophic decision. It is the accumulation of micro-tradeoffs made during sprint planning.
Engineers are constantly balancing competing constraints: load speed, code complexity, deadline adherence, and legacy integration. In this negotiation, accessibility often loses because its failure mode is silent.
A refactor to a modern JavaScript framework inadvertently drops focus management on a modal window.
A performance optimization strips “unused” code that was actually handling screen reader announcements.
A third-party chat widget is added via a tag manager, bypassing the code review process entirely.
These tradeoffs are often justified as “edge cases” to be fixed in a fast-follow sprint that never arrives. Because accessibility debt is non-linear, these small gaps compound. A missing label here and a broken focus trap there eventually render the entire flow unusable, even if the individual components seem passable in isolation.
Accessibility requires enforcement
The reliance on annual or quarterly audits is a symptom of a reactive culture. An audit is an autopsy; it tells you what is already broken. It does not prevent the break.
For accessibility to survive in a continuous deployment environment, it must move from verification to enforcement.
Verification asks: “Is this accessible?” (Manual, slow, end-of-process).
Enforcement asks: “Does the build fail if this is not accessible?” (Automated, instant, mid-process).
Teams often lack the tooling to detect regression. If a deployment breaks the checkout flow, alarms go off immediately. If a deployment breaks the screen reader flow, the silence is deafening. Without automated linting, CI/CD blockers, and semantic unit tests, accessibility relies entirely on human memory. And human memory always degrades with scale.
What persistent accessibility actually requires
Persistent accessibility is not a matter of better checklists or more empathy training. It is a matter of operational constraints.
It requires a CMS that refuses to publish content without structure. It requires a build pipeline that rejects code with missing ARIA references. It requires a design system where “accessible” is the only available state for a component.
Successful organizations stop treating accessibility as a values problem and start treating it as a quality assurance problem. They institute accessibility budgets alongside performance budgets. They automate the baseline so that human reviewers can focus on complexity rather than syntax.
Accessibility fails quietly
The most dangerous aspect of accessibility regression is its silence. When a site goes down, support tickets flood in. When accessibility breaks, the affected users simply leave.
They do not file Jira tickets. They do not complain on Twitter. They bounce. The erosion of trust is invisible to the monitoring tools most teams use. Legal exposure appears late, often years after the regression began.
Accessibility survives only when systems are designed to prevent its erosion. It is not maintained by good intentions. It is maintained by an architecture that makes it difficult to break.
