Accessibility for startups: when it actually pays to start

Almost every founder we talk to wants to do accessibility "properly" — eventually. The pattern is consistent: ship the MVP, raise the round, then bring in the specialists. We get it. But the cost of fixing accessibility scales roughly with the size of your codebase, and the longer you wait, the more decisions need to be unwound.

What's cheap to do at pre-seed / seed

• Pick a component library or design system that's accessible by default (Radix, React Aria, shadcn/ui).
• Define color tokens that meet 4.5:1 contrast at definition, not at QA.
• Use semantic HTML. The single highest-leverage rule on the web.
• Add a skip link, real focus styles, and proper heading order.

Total time investment: about a day spread across the first two engineers. Total cost saved later: weeks per year.

What's expensive to retrofit

• Custom interactive components (modals, dropdowns, dialogs) built without ARIA from scratch
• A color system that fails contrast on every brand surface
• Routing and focus management — fixing this after launch is a quarter of work
• Dynamic content patterns (toasts, live updates) without accessibility plumbing

When to bring in help

1. 01Before launch — a 1-week design + code review catches the structural issues that compound.
2. 02Before your first enterprise sales motion — procurement teams ask for VPATs.
3. 03Before any redesign — it's cheaper to bake in than bolt on (again).