Small Wins, Big Change: Incremental Accessibility on an Active Codebase

Accessibility is often framed as a massive, scary project: audit everything, rip out the design system, ship a new accessible theme, repeat. That's demoralizing and rarely realistic for teams shipping features. In practice, accessibility improves fastest when it's framed as a steady cadence of small, deliberate fixes - the sort of work you can ship with a single PR. This article lays out a pragmatic, repeatable approach: how to find the most valuable fixes, how to use tools and agent skills to automate the boring parts, and how to batch system-level problems without blocking day-to-day product work. I'll show the workflow we use on a pre-launch short-form news project and give templates you can use tomorrow. On Newdle - the small, evidence-first news startup I'm rockin' at - we build tools that prioritize evidence over noise. Newdle's mission is to break barriers between headlines and meaningful context, so accessibility can't be a one-off project. It has to be part of how we ship, tes