I wouldn't consider myself an accessibility specialist, but I know a thing or two about it, specifically on how to deploy it strategically in a large organizati

I wouldn't consider myself an accessibility specialist, but I know a thing or two about it, specifically on how to deploy it strategically in a large organization (Fortune 500). I'd say the lack of accessibility is not really due to indifference, much more likely it is plain ignorance. Most people know close to nothing about accessibility, worse, don't even know that they need to know. There's also a technical perspective. Web tech in general is very low level primitives that you stitch together, not really a coherent higher order UI stack. This means that for any given goal, there's a million ways to do it. There's a stunning lack of UI elements but even simple elements that do exist do not truly enforce accessibility. For example, there's no such thing as a tab component, so people build their own. It's relatively difficult to make it fully accessible. And that assumes you'd even know about accessibility. Take a simpler element, the img element. I might not know that there is such a thing as an "alt" tag. I'm supposed to know but nothing enforces this knowledge, there's no standard education in web dev. Even if I do know about the alt tag, I might ignore it, as excuse I'll use "other priorities". Or I do use it, but incorrectly, which happens more often than not. My point is that all of this is almost entirely dependent on personal knowledge and discipline, which is a recipe for disaster at web scale. We need better foundations. That said, there's reasons to be hopeful. It's definitely getting more attention nowadays and the tooling ecosystem is rapidly improving.