[bobthepanda]

The problem is that anyone can pick up design and web dev and get up and running fairly quickly, but very few intro tutorials even touch accessibility or get into it. Therefore beginners easily wind up doing things like using links or divs instead of buttons because buttons look bad by default, instead of overriding button css.

And then usually you pile up thousands of kludges before someone blows a whistle and says “Hey, none of this is accessible!”, and then you look back at a mountain of inaccessible garbage you wrote and claim it’s too hard.

So long as design and webdev are learned informally, this will always be an issue. Especially because unless you yourself need the assistance of accessibility software, it’s not obvious that things are broken, because they look good.

As an aside, I also feel like this is because webdev and design are taken less seriously by the world of programming. My college offered only one course on webdev and it mostly involved teaching PHP and jQuery. So no one takes it seriously and then they half-ass learning it.