Making Accessibility Accessible, Part II: Systems, Psychology, and Infrastructure for Lasting Change

In Making Accessibility Accessible, Part I, we diagnosed the persistent web accessibility gap as a fundamental mismatch between enterprise-focused tooling and the resource-constrained realities of most web developers, proposing the Care Framework as a corrective lens. This sequel transforms diagnosis into a prescription. We demonstrate that sustainable progress requires understanding accessibility implementation not as isolated technical problems but as symptoms of interconnected systemic failures. Through analysis of the causal mechanisms sustaining the implementation gap, we reveal how architectural constraints create cognitive burdens, cognitive burdens undermine effective learning, impaired learning stifles adoption, and failed adoption reinforces the perception of accessibility as impossible---completing a self-reinforcing cycle. Breaking this cycle requires coordinated intervention at leverage points where small changes produce cascading effects. We propose two high-impact architectural interventions: (1) tiered, implementation-focused documentation that mirrors WCAG's compliance criteria with scaffolded, task-oriented guidance for builders, and (2) framework-level accessible defaults that shift responsibility upstream, making accessible implementation easier than inaccessible implementation. These interventions, grounded in behavioral science and validated by successful infrastructure transformations, address some of the most common WCAG errors, which are present on a significant proportion of homepages through changes requiring minimal ongoing developer effort. This work provides the actionable blueprint to operationalize care, demonstrating that the path to an accessible web requires not educating developers to overcome systemic barriers, but redesigning systems to eliminate those barriers entirely.