If you don't want this to break eventually, you need it tested every time your CI/CD test suite runs. Manual testing just doesn't cut it

> There are thousands of blind people on the net. Can't you hire one of them to test for you?

Testing is a professional skill -- not all blind people are good at accessibility testing, just as not all sighted people are good at GUI testing.

My team has carved out an accessibility budget so that every couple years we can hire an accessibility consultancy (which employs a couple blind testers) for a few tens of hours of work to review one of our application workflows. Based on the issues they identify we attempt to write tests to prevent those classes of issues across the whole application suite, but our budget means that less than one percent of our UI has ever been functionally tested for accessibility.

It comes down to cost/benefit. Good testers are expensive, good accessibility testers doubly-so. And while I personally think there's a moral imperative and maybe a marketing angle, improving accessibility truthfully doesn't seem to meaningfully improve sales. But if the testing costs came down by a couple orders of magnitude it would be a complete game-changer.

Realistically I'm unlikely to do that for my dozens of non-income-generating personal projects.

I still want them to be accessible!

(The amount of accessibility testing I want to do would bankrupt me very quickly.)

This. I've been doing a lot of accessibility work and it seems like the one thing nobody ever does is talk to a screenreader user.

Most of us can't, no. Sorry. There's just not enough money in the things we make.

Why not both?