That isn't what happens in reality though. The end result is appeasing 3rd party scanners like Powermapper without actually making the site any more accessible

That isn't what happens in reality though. The end result is appeasing 3rd party scanners like Powermapper without actually making the site any more accessible and in some cases making it less accessible. I've had to remove ARIA labels because Powermapper flags it as a problem for some screen readers. That's right. The markup we added to make the site as accessible as we could for screen readers was flagged as an issue and we had to remove it. My job isn't to make websites more accessible because of these lawsuits, it's to put a stop to the lawsuits by any means necessary to the detriment of everyone. To quote my earlier post, I actually despise my job because I don't get to spend time making our websites more accessible to users but instead spend most of my time appeasing lawyers with too much time on their hands.