Is it on a "product owner" to care about accessibility? Or engineers to build things properly? If this was any other engineering field - civil, mechanical, electrical, there would be standards which we seem to lack / fail to enforce
This is by design. Software developers are hardly "engineers". They build what the business wants, quickly, and worry about the "properly" after product-market fit is found (or so they're told). This dynamic would be upended if software engineering were licensed.
And that's not even counting all the jobs like sales engineer, mud engineer (oil business), etc. that are really more engineering-adjacent jobs (if that).
When I took the engineer in training exam--never had a reason to follow through on a PE, it basically required things like a four-year engineering degree, working under someone for some number of years, passing the PE exam, and presumably signing code of ethics, etc. For certain jobs, it is pretty much a requirement past some level but mostly doesn't matter a lot.
I get paid the same not to fight. More even, because I’m a team player.
It's by someone at a higher level deciding that they care about accessibility (or that they care about not getting sued), and introducing constraints which their designers and engineers must work within, and making compliance with the constraints part of the QA process.
Thankfully for Reddit they found the product market fit 10 years ago.
They're just a bad software company.