My experience is that a11y is often not a priority and then one day it is suddenly the highest priority. It is not fun to have to drop everything you are doing

My experience is that a11y is often not a priority and then one day it is suddenly the highest priority. It is not fun to have to drop everything you are doing and retrofit and/or redesign to avoid a lawsuit or losing a big contract. The easiest thing you can do is run a linter with an a11y plugin to make sure you cover the basics. It can be annoying at first, but you'll get used to it. A tool like axe (https://github.com/dequelabs/axe-core https://github.com/dequelabs/axe-core) is good for checking your work and/or automating away some of the less obvious stuff. It provides both a Chrome plugin and an automated checker for CI. Getting comfortable enough with this stuff that it no longer requires a ton of work is definitely a good goal. Your users will have a better time overall and you'll have peace of mind.