Accessibility usually enters the conversation as a checkbox. A compliance line in a contract, an audit before launch, a plugin that promises to fix it after the fact.
I think about it differently. The organizations I build for exist to serve the public: audiences, donors, students, communities. Their website is the front door. A public website that isn’t usable by everyone isn’t truly serving the public. It’s serving the subset of the public that happens to browse the way the builders do.
So I ship to WCAG and ADA standards by default, not as a request line item. Semantic HTML before ARIA patches. Real heading structure. Keyboard paths through every interaction. Color contrast checked in the design system, not per page. Motion that respects the visitor who asked their device for less of it.
There’s a practical bonus that gets less attention than it should: accessible structure is machine-readable structure. The same semantic markup that helps a screen reader parse a page helps a search crawler and an answer engine parse it too. The most accessible version of a site and the most discoverable version of a site are largely the same site.
But the bonus isn’t the reason. The reason is that these institutions asked people to trust them with public missions, and the website is where most of the public actually meets them. Building that door so everyone can walk through it isn’t a feature. It’s the job.