Understand conformance and reality

Start from the behavior you can observe. The team maps failures to criteria and also records confusing behavior that no automated score explains.

Standards organize important requirements, but usability, language, platform differences, and real assistive technology still need human judgment. The useful target is not encyclopedic coverage. Make one deliberate choice, observe its consequences, and know which requirement would make you revise it.

It is tempting to chase a perfect automated score and stop when the badge turns green. That trades a clear decision for an assumption you will eventually have to debug. The stronger move is to combine criterion-based checks, task testing, and user evidence, then prioritize barriers by impact. Make the boundary explicit in code and in the project notes.

Tie the decision back to the larger job: Frame accessibility around successful user tasks and inspect what browsers expose to assistive technology. Record enough evidence that another developer can repeat the result without relying on your memory.

Take one automated finding and one manual usability problem and show how each affects the registration task. Repeat it once with an invalid or hostile condition and write down the boundary the failure revealed.