Most accessibility bugs I have shipped were not bugs in features. They were bugs in primitives. A modal primitive that did not trap focus. A select primitive that hijacked the wrong keyboard events. A toast primitive that announced silently.
Once a primitive is wrong, every feature built on top of it is wrong in the same way. That is why accessibility cannot live as a backlog of tickets after the fact. It has to live in the layer everyone builds on top of, and the only way to get there is to make the design system own it.
When I rewrote our system primitives with accessibility as a hard requirement at the primitive layer, the accessibility ticket queue dropped to nearly zero — not because we were better at fixing bugs, but because most of them stopped being possible.
From a systems perspective, implementing this solution required auditing our telemetry structures. We mapped key transactions across our distributed database queries and evaluated the locking overheads under heavy load. By setting up strict validation rules in Prisma, we isolated runtime query errors before they could trickle up to the client view.
Ultimately, building durable systems means choosing boring abstractions and documenting architectural decisions (ADRs) meticulously. When infrastructure behaves predictably, your team can deploy with high confidence. We enforce these performance and security budgets in our continuous integration (CI) workflows, ensuring that every merge maintains the same standard.