…starts with empathy
This article on northtemple says a lot of what I was trying to say in the previous post, except a lot better. And it hits the most important point, which I totally missed.
Accessibility starts with empathy. As just about everything in web design and development starts with empathy. If you have no empathy for your users, you are going to fail. You are particularly going to fail if, at the first sign of things getting tricky (“we need to think about accessibility”), you switch off your empathy for a user and reduce them to someone you can afford to have not use your site. Not least because it is never “a user”. It is the user you thought of and the literally tons of users, doing things almost the same way, who you have no idea about, because you really aren’t that clever.