You are in a minority. Minorities are always an afterthought. It's hard meeting the needs of every single minority - there are so many with many diverse needs.
Yes, being in the small group that wants people to actually use proper accessible markup as WCAG indicates does put me in a minority, it's true.
However, this concept that there are a lot of minorities so obviously we can't cover all the bases seems a little silly. Do people of color need different markup? Do women require somebody adds special javascript libraries so they can access the content?
Making content accessible to a screen reader is part of our job as web developers. Just like the site isn't done until it renders in IE 11, it's not done until it reads with NVDA. In fact, often times people can install an alternative browser, whereas it is currently impossible to install an alternative pair of eyeballs, so I would go so far as to advocate accessibility before heroic browser compatibility battles but obviously I'm biased here ;-)
>Just like the site isn't done until it renders in IE 11, it's not done until it reads with NVDA.
Interesting opinion. I'd argue that it's not at all a web developer's job to comply with every single accessibility guideline or support outdated browsers, unless required by their contract and paid for by whoever commissioned the work. These requirements are part of the reason that most governmental contracts are overpriced by a factor of 10 (the other reason being corruption).
It is unfortunate that the effort spent to accommodate screen readers is easy to see as less rewarding than the effort invested into all of the other users... Truthfully, it seems like the only really good solution would be to make screen readers much better at understanding the content than to make the content much better at being understood by screen readers. Pool the expertise where the need is. This kind of thing is why I feel that good AI is so important. We can make information far more accessible, especially when you consider that the AI doesn't actually have eyes either.
Well, I wasn't referring to just websites. Any software you make is probably going to have some kind of accessibility issues. For example, does your app have color cues for anything? Colorblind people may have an issue with that and so you need to take that into consideration and make the app colorblind friendly as well. It's virtually impossible de-conflicting all the types of colorblindness, so usually people just use icons to tag things instead of colors. This is even more important for things like games where colors indicate critical functions (hence why games sometimes have "colorblind mode")
You are in a minority. Minorities are always an afterthought. It's hard meeting the needs of every single minority - there are so many with many diverse needs.