Here’s a smart post from Manuel Matuzovic where he digs into why accessibility is so important for building websites:
Web accessibility is not just about keyboard users, color contrast or screen readers. Accessibility is a perfect indicator for the quality of a website. Accessibility is strongly interlocked with other areas of web design and web development. If your website is accessible, it usually means that it’s inclusive, resilient, usable, it offers great UX for everyone, and it’s fast.
I love this idea: that you can’t have a good UI that isn’t also accessible and how accessibility, performance, and quality are all intermingled with one another. Actually, this has me thinking… I’ve never worked on a project where either of these things are the problem in isolation. It’s all of them, always.