> I literally add it as a line-item to the bill and let customers take it off if they want to save cost, and when it's for professional work the only industry that has actual regulation around it is education/government.
Take note, the takeaway from this comment is that if you're building a platform for applications and you want to make it accessible, it has to be required. You can't give engineers the choice or they won't do it. They will not prioritize equal access unless either the law or the technology literally forces them to. This kind of stuff is how you get regulated.
This is also why I don't have a ton of sympathy for the people who want to get rid of HTML and use exclusively lower level APIs. They'll tell you they can replicate accessibility features, but they're not going to. They're going to open up the floodgate for interfaces that can't be used with a keyboard. Like, I'm not seriously suggesting this, but maybe divs in HTML shouldn't be clickable at all. Maybe you should be forced to use a button. Maybe the escape hatches that allow people to ignore semantic markup should go away.
I want to live in a world where I can trust developers when they say that the web is for everyone and that equal access is important, and I want to trust them to make educated decisions about what is and isn't possible to make accessible for each project. But if we can't even get people to use buttons instead of divs, if even that turns into some kind of controversy... I don't know, maybe developers shouldn't get to make that choice, maybe the web should force you to use buttons.
The whole point of the web is that it's a universal platform, as much as possible we should be striving to make it universally accessible.
> The other problem is I do accessibility right
We're not talking about something like adding professional captions to every single video you produce or making sure that there are shortcuts to quick-navigate through menus, we're talking about building buttons using the element named "button".
Accessibility isn't binary, we don't have to decide to either do professional testing or to render everything to canvas. It really doesn't take firing up a screenreader to know that a clickable div with no aria roles is not accessible, you don't have to do advanced testing for that.
I'm not going to jump on the shame train for the original author, not everyone knows this stuff and I don't blame the author for making a mistake. I don't expect every web developer to know everything, and shaming people over accidentally breaking accessibility isn't helpful for the cause. Instead we should focus on education and positive reinforcement. We don't want new developers to be scared of accessibility, we want them to feel like we're here to help.
But outside of the original developer, I am absolutely going to jump on the shame train for everyone who's talking about very basic web accessibility features like they're some kind of complicated tradeoff. They're not. Using a button is not hard.