Accessibility on a Site That Has to Reach Everyone

Accessibility is often framed as a compliance checkbox. On an EdTech marketing site, it's closer to a business requirement, and I make that case to engineering directly. HackerU's homepage deliberately serves many audiences on one surface — prospective students, current students, graduates, recruiters, discharged soldiers. A site whose entire premise is 'everyone finds their path here' cannot then exclude people who navigate by keyboard, screen reader, or with low vision. That's the industry-specific angle: in education, accessibility is part of the promise of access itself. For a CTO, the implementation reality is what matters. I bake WCAG considerations into the design system rather than auditing them in at the end — semantic structure for the personalized entry layer, focus order that survives the adaptive content card, sufficient contrast in the visual system, and the dense course-page tables built with real headers and relationships rather than visual styling alone. That last point is the trap: data-heavy content like the salary anchor reads fine visually but collapses for assistive tech if structure is faked. Accessibility designed into the system is cheap to maintain. Retrofitted, it's a recurring tax on every release.