I want to talk about accessibility without sounding like someone reading you a regulation.
Here is the framing that finally landed for me. If you built the door, you decided who gets through it. That isn't a compliance matter. It's close to the whole nature of the work.
For years I treated it the way most of us did. A checklist at the end. Contrast ratios, alt text, a pass with a tool, a box ticked. Which is to say I treated a person's ability to use the thing I made as a quality-assurance step rather than as the point of it.
What changed my mind was noticing how ordinary the need is. We picture accessibility as a small group of people with permanent conditions, and I think that's a failure of imagination. It's a parent holding a baby with one arm. It's someone in bright sun squinting at a phone. It's a person of fifty-five whose eyes have started doing what eyes do. It's me, eventually, temporarily or for good. We are all on our way to needing it.
And the discipline of it tends to make the work better for everyone. Clear hierarchy, honest contrast, generous targets, a page that still makes sense when it's read aloud in order. Those aren't accommodations. That's just good design. That we needed a law to nudge us toward doing it says something uncomfortable about the trade, myself included, rather than adding a burden to it.
So I've stopped treating it as a phase. It was never optional. It was only the part we were allowed to skip while nobody was looking.