[bramd]

Yes, if you make a mess and bring in some accessibility compliance people that have to suggest all kinds of shitty workarounds it will cost you money. If your devs don't know why those shitty workarounds are there they will break it all again in a next release. If you just use semantic HTML from the start you'll have a more robust product and less maintenance in the long run.

Oh, and ARIA rule one: don't use ARIA, use the native HTML equivalent. Rule two: Only use ARIA if you can't express your intent in native HTML and make sure you know what your code is doing, don't just copy paste some ARIA example from another project or random site, lots of ARIA in the wild is wrong.

I'm a blind developer and accessibility consultant. Accessibility consulting is a good business to have these days, but I hope my work will be obsolete one day :).