Most startups don’t think about accessibility until something forces them to. A big enterprise prospect asks for a VPAT. A user files a complaint. Legal sends a message that starts with “we’ve been made aware of a potential ADA claim.” That’s when the calls come in.
I work with early-stage teams on exactly this kind of situation. If you’re trying to figure out where to start, my contact form can be form on the homepage.
The startup version of the problem
Here’s the thing about accessibility and startups - technical debt accumulates fast. You’re moving quickly, the team is small, and nobody explicitly owns accessibility.
So you ship a design system without checking focus states, build a modal without managing focus trapping, write an entire onboarding flow without thinking about screen reader announcements. None of it is maybe malicious. It’s just not on the radar.
Then the product matures, the team grows, and now you’ve got a couple of years of accessibility debt sitting inside a codebase that’s getting harder to change.
Fixing it at that stage costs significantly more than it would have cost to get it right the first time.
What actually makes sense at early stage
I wouldn’t recommend a full WCAG audit on a prototype or MVP. That’s not the right tool for the moment. What does make sense:
A design system review
If you’re building components that will be reused across the product, getting them right early is high leverage. Focus management, keyboard interaction patterns, ARIA usage, colour contrast in your token set. Fix it once at the component level and you don’t have to fix it in every place the component is used.
Onboarding a developer who knows ARIA
You don’t need to hire an accessibility specialist full time, but you do benefit from someone who can do code review with accessibility in mind. Even a short engagement to establish patterns is worth it.
A light audit before a key milestone
Before you close a significant enterprise deal, before you launch publicly, before you submit to regulated procurement. A targeted review of your core user journeys is much cheaper than a full audit and gives you the picture you need.
When you do need a full engagement
If you’re selling to enterprise customers who need a VPAT or Accessibility Conformance Report as part of procurement. That’s a real deliverable you need to produce, and it needs to be accurate.
Producing a misleading or made up VPAT is a legal risk you don’t want.
If you’ve had a legal letter citing ADA or equivalent, you need to understand the actual state of your product quickly, prioritise the highest-risk barriers, and document that you’re taking remediation seriously.
A credentialled audit report is part of that story.
What I’d say to a founder specifically
Accessibility doesn’t have to be an all-or-nothing thing.
You don’t have to be perfect before you ship. What you do need is to be moving in the right direction and to be honest about where you are.
If you are hiring “full stack” developers or Frontend developers that don’t know about accessibility the tech is going to be quite high.
The companies that get into real trouble are usually the ones that either knew about the problems and did nothing, or produced compliance documentation that didn’t reflect the actual state of the product. Both of those are avoidable.
Building accessibly from the start is cheaper than remediating later. Getting a small amount of expert input early is cheaper than a large fix under pressure later. That’s not a scare tactic, it’s just how the maths works.
If you’re running a startup and trying to figure out what level of accessibility investment makes sense right now, get in touch via my contact form. I’m happy to have that conversation without it turning into a sales pitch for a large engagement you don’t need yet.