In GovTech, Accessibility Is a Spec, Not a Score

Most teams treat accessibility as a quality bar you try to clear. In govtech I treat it the way R&D treats a security requirement: it's a spec with legal teeth, and 'mostly accessible' is a failed audit. WCAG conformance here isn't aspirational — it's the contract. What I ask engineering leaders to internalize is that this changes how you build, not just how you test. Semantic HTML and a real focus model aren't cleanup work; they're the foundation a screen reader user stands on. Custom components — the fancy date picker, the multi-step wizard — are exactly where public services fail audits, so I'm conservative there by design, favoring native elements and well-trodden ARIA patterns over clever ones. The other industry-specific reality is the breadth of your users: someone on assistive tech, on an old device, in bright sunlight, under stress, with low digital literacy, all on the same form. That's a wider envelope than most consumer apps ever face. So I bake accessibility checks into CI, make keyboard-only navigation a definition-of-done item, and test with actual assistive technology, not just an automated linter. The goal isn't a passing score. It's a service nobody is locked out of.