Accessibility is mostly not a design problem

We went back through nine audits and sorted every failure by where it originated. The split surprised us less than it surprised our clients.

Where failures come from

Roughly two-thirds were implementation: buttons built from divs, forms without labels, focus that vanishes inside a modal, headings used for size rather than structure. About a quarter were content: link text that says "click here", images with decorative alt text describing the file name. The remainder were genuine design issues, mostly contrast on disabled states.

Why that matters

If most failures are implementation, then accessibility work belongs in code review, not in a design sign-off at the end. We now run keyboard-only passes at the end of each build block, which takes about twenty minutes and catches the majority of what an audit would later bill for.