We don't have a legal mandate per se to be accessible but many of our subscribers do have a mandate that services they buy have to be accessible. Many of our customers insist on it because they have a legal mandate to be accessible. The university that we are a part of got sued because it made web sites that were not accessible
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2018/12/10/fifty-college...
and in principle any school could get in trouble for buying products and services that aren't accessible. So it is part of the contracts we sign now, we do accessibility audits regularly to stay ahead of issues, sometimes we have have customers who do their own audits. Thus a11y is a major priority here so I have learned all about ARIA (our app is a great fit) not to mention the real formulas for color spaces, contrast ratios and how to use a screen reader.
The US doesn't really have any regulatory apparatus for disability access - ADA liability is how it gets handled. The legal test is murky, the amount you're liable for is murky, and thats generally considered ok, because it will make you fix your shit (legal term).
https://www.vcstar.com/story/news/local/2023/05/15/ventura-c...
https://www.forbes.com/sites/gusalexiou/2023/06/30/website-a...
In the EU:
As of 28 June 2025, companies must ensure that the newly marketed products and services covered by the Act are accessible. Member States may decide to make some exceptions. For instance, they can allow more time for the application of the new rules to service providers using self-service terminals. Microenterprises (i.e., a small business with fewer than 10 employees) which provide services also are exempted from the obligations of the Act. Nevertheless, all microenterprises are encouraged to make their products and services accessible to persons with disabilities.
Plus, its not that hard to do correctly, so the “we’re a startup on a critical burn rate” stops working as an excuse rather early
It's not a question of it being too hard or easy, but as always, a question of priorities.
Say you can either build feature A which is expected to open up the product to be used by 1% more users, as people been asking for that feature. Or you can build feature B, which enables motionsick people to use your app without getting sick from your wasteful animations. This will help 0.001% of your current users, when you have 10,000 users in total lets say.
Not saying it's right or wrong, but I understand why people (managers/owners) make the choice to do feature A instead of feature B, especially in a startup-context where it might be the (imaginary or not) choice between surviving or not.
I'm personally in the camp of thinking about accessibility as part of all the work done, but it's not exactly the mainstream workflow.
In my previous life at an ad agency we had a number of clients getting pursued by accessibility lawyers and firms. These were typically nothing more than shakedowns for some insignificant settlement (<$10k) - but it was an open-and-shut case if you wanted to take it to court so it was just easier to settle and spend a couple of sprints on WCAG best practices.
IANAL and my agency didn't do the actual implementation so it was typically up to the client to sort out - but having a lawyer on hand should be one of the first things you take care of once you start making or accepting large amounts of money.
Typically it was just an embarrassing experience for some middle manager, some lost budget, and some extra dev hours to add 'WCAG Compliance' to the QA checklist.
Meaning: you should think about it early on, and design for the need, but not over invest in it too early.
If you're at the the stage where you don't know if your idea will work, you shouldn't be polishing accessibility, just like you shouldn't be denormalizing your database schema to increase performance.
However, you should be thinking about accessibility, just like you should be thinking about how your database queries will scale if you get increased load.
So for example: if you're making a database of images, why not add a field for alt text from the start and start populating it now? If your app needs drag and drop, why not start sketching out an alternative flow for people who can't drag and drop now?
Accessibility is more often compared to security; if you don't think about how to securely transfer or store data early on, it's going to be much harder later on (support for SSO before you have users might be premature optimization unless your product is especially geared toward enterprises).
'big' open source projects like blender,etc - what are their responsibilities? A quick look at the site doesn't find much except that it's a work in progress.
What is the responsibility of a single developer with a 'scratch an itch' project on github?
Can I as a developer release something for personal use when it's good enough for my own purposes, but miles away from being accessible?
It's going to vary a lot, but one metric that's used by lawyers in finding companies to sue is whether it impedes another protected action. For example, hiring employees has lots of rules and protections, therefore the website where people can look at and apply for your jobs needs to be accessible, especially if there is no other way to apply.
This was about 5-6 years ago though and I was told back then that there was a number of people who are deliberately scouring the internet for websites with accessibility issues so they can sue them for not complying with US accessibility laws. These lawsuits I believe can be fairly costly for large organisations – I know I was given numbers in the millions, but I was on the technical team so I can't say for sure whether that number is accurate.
In one of the cases I was involved with we were given a period of time to take remedial action to make our site accessible otherwise we could face additional fines. I'd assume if you have a reasonable excuse that the penalties and remediation period would be more lenient.
I'll also add I'm from the UK, but our websites served US customers and our lawsuits came from the US. I believe the UK has similar accessibility laws, but I guess we don't have the same culture of suing businesses.
If your font is slightly too small or an alt-text is missing, or whatever? A lawsuit should have zero chance of success, which would then eliminate the blackmail game of "settle or we sue".
Not a friend of accessibility though. It requires so much work to satisfy a small base of users.
Reader mode will help with some disabilities but not others.
> It's only when people reconstruct primitives that assistive technology breaks.
I like using the platform too, but users don't use primitives - they interact with higher level elements like carousels, profile pictures, comment boxes, and most new UI elements do not have accessibility industry ARIA role.