Accessibility Doesn't Scale. Until It Does.

Manual accessibility tasks - writing alt text, checking contrast, adapting layouts - rarely scale across large interfaces. Specialist hours are finite, deadlines compress the checklist, and the debt accumulates quietly until something forces the issue. Usually a legal one.

AI is starting to change the economics of that. Continuous WCAG monitoring, automated contrast flagging, alt text generation, layout adaptation for cognitive preferences - tasks that used to require dedicated hours can now run in the background at a fraction of the cost. For teams managing large component libraries or multi-brand systems, that's a meaningful shift.

But there's a number worth keeping in mind: automated tools catch roughly 30 to 40 percent of real accessibility issues. Courts have repeatedly ruled that one-click overlay plugins don't substitute for genuine remediation. A button with a trash icon passes an automated check. Without an aria-label, a screen reader announces "button" with no indication of what it does. The automated tool sees a valid element. The meaning isn't there. That gap doesn't close automatically.

The teams making real progress are using AI as a screening layer - catching obvious issues early, keeping the backlog from growing