At some point in your life, you will have a broken wrist.
Or a migraine. Or a two-year-old in one arm while you navigate a form with the other. Or a screen you cannot read in direct sunlight.
At that moment, you will hit an accessibility barrier in something built without you in mind. Not the disabled version of you, the temporary, situational, completely ordinary version of you that every human being becomes, regularly, across a lifetime.
Two weeks ago I was in a government accessibility workshop. A few months before that I ran an accessibility audit on a live UK government website. What an audit always reveals is the same thing: products that work perfectly for the imagined user and break quietly for everyone else. Not broken by intention. Invisible by default.
The WHO puts the global figure at 1.3 billion people living with a significant disability; 16% of the global population. The UN estimates 80% of them live in developing countries. In Africa, the WHO Regional Office puts the number at around 80 million people. These are not fringe numbers. And they almost certainly undercount, data collection across the continent is inconsistent, and many conditions go undiagnosed.
Here is the tension.
Most product teams talk about accessibility after the product is built. It becomes a retrofit that is expensive, incomplete, and easy to cut when the deadline moves. Teams that deprioritise it believe they are making a rational trade-off: serve the majority now, improve for the minority later.
The problem is that the majority is a fiction. The user navigating with one hand, in poor lighting, on a slow connection, that is not a minority user. That is most users, at some point.
If you wait until the product is built to think about accessibility, you have already made all the decisions that matter. The time to design for it is before you start, not as a feature but as a constraint that improves everything else.
What I keep noticing in the government work is this: the teams that take accessibility seriously do not just build more inclusive services. They build better ones. Designing for real human variation rather than an idealised, hypothetical user is making the whole product sharper.
The broken hand is not a special case. It is just the version of the problem you can feel.