There's a particular kind of false confidence that comes from a green accessibility report. The CI check passes, the Lighthouse score says 100, the AXE panel is all ticks. You ship it. And somewhere, a person using a screen reader hits your component and simply can't.
I've shipped that component. More than once. Here's what I learned the hard way: automated accessibility testing checks whether your HTML is well-formed, not whether your interface is usable. Those are very different questions, and the gap between them is where real users get stranded.
AXE is genuinely excellent — wire it into CI today if you haven't. But it works by inspecting a static snapshot of the DOM and checking it against a ruleset. It can see that an attribute is present. It cannot see whether the attribute is true, whether the sequence makes sense, or whether anything actually happens when you press a key. It catches roughly a third of WCAG issues. The other two-thirds need a human.
Let me show you the gap, with five components that all pass AXE clean.
1. The modal that swallows your focus
