Apple seems to do it because it's in their ethos. Jobs and Cooks have both said it matters to them. They aren't big in enterprise (or even education) so I don't think that argument fits. I think they just care. That may be a bit of my bias but I can't come up with a good business case for them.
MS may or may not care, but accessibility is often a requirement for government contracts (or buisnesses who want government contracts) so it's a good sales feature for them, even if something if a checkbox feature. They work very hard at t too.
But the end result is that both of them work really hard on accessibility and everyone benefits.
Yes that is what I meant. Apple and MS are for-profit, but they have massive profits from something else and a huge safety net. This is opposed to a company that either makes accessible software specifically, or makes software that would benefit from being accessible (let's say an IDE such as IntelliJ).
Apple (from what I have heard MS too) really does amazing work in accessibility but this would not be possible had they not had enough resources. I can understand why understaffed open source projects do not allocate more resources to accessibility.
My point with MS is that they're not doing it out of the good of their hearts (for argument) and just spending their profits... they are REQUIRED to do it to be able to get many of their biggest contracts. They are doing it so they CAN sell.
MS may or may not care, but accessibility is often a requirement for government contracts (or buisnesses who want government contracts) so it's a good sales feature for them, even if something if a checkbox feature. They work very hard at t too.
But the end result is that both of them work really hard on accessibility and everyone benefits.