[zersiax]

Generally what you want is to have people like this embedded within the team/the company itself for this reason. When I do an audit, or when I stream on Twitch about a product/website/whatever I aalways make sure I remain available for questions/followups, but accessibility isn't a checkbox to check, it's a standard you maintain and that means experts need to be there to help you maintain that standard.

[mgkimsal]

Not everyone can afford to have extra team members doing that. Some of us are working with skeletal teams to begin with, but would still like ways of validating/reviewing a11y concerns with real people, not just scripts and automated tools. And yes, on an ongoing basis, not just a one-time thing.

[zersiax]

Oh absolutely. In an ideal world, we see a lot of disabled folk with a bunch of applicable knowledge be hired to do this for companies. The reality is that a lot of people who have the knowledge are actually unemployed, the teams who want to hire them don't have the budget for it, and the large corporations that should know better don't think the effect on their initial bottom line is worth not wilfully excluding a whole bunch of people. like, I have literally seen companies just decide that risking the 20k settlement for an ADA lawsuit is cheaper than fixing all the accessibility issues they managed to include, at which point the business case of making money and the non-business case of not being dicks to a potential huge amount of people clash. Usually, business wins.

I'd say for smaller teams it is doubly important to think about this topic early to minimize the overhead of having to fix a whole bunch of bad moves you figure out you've made when someone complains months or even years after you've made them. As for doing this now and again, I think some of the QA firms like APplause and such do offer accessibility testing services and such now, and there's social media like HN, Reddit, Mastodon or, if one must, X, where people can be found who'll be happy to do this provided they can be fairly compensated. Not exactly structural or centraalized but there you have it :)