Here's another thing to keep in mind. I am hearing impaired. I've been seeing more information given through screencasts and videos, often untranscribed or uncaptioned. For example, I make websites, so I'd have liked a captioned or transcribed version for the screencast in this article. There's also been other sites where the sole tutorial was an uncaptioned video.
Is the problem lack of awareness? It takes much more effort to caption or transcribe videos and make websites screenreader friendly than to use valid HTML and CSS. But when I ask about making something accessible, people are usually happy to oblige. I suspect it's because suddenly they realize part of their target audience needs it.
In the same sense, we've also forgotten about flossing and eating lots of vegetables. Accessibility is one of those things that everybody knows is nice but they simply have other things that take precedence most of the time. Similarly, lots of application developers used to ignore Mac users when the platform had 2% marketshare (which is greater than the proportion of visitors to your site who will be using a screenreader). Other things were more important to them, like getting a product out that works for most people and makes the company money. As a lifelong Mac user (even in the '90s), I know it's annoying being left out, but at the same time, I've come to realize it wouldn't be better if nothing got made because putting in heroic effort to support every minority group makes development too time-consuming and expensive.
His site is even a great illustration of the problem: For all the talk of including everyone, his search box is literally inaccessible in my 575px-tall browser window.
Sorry about the search box being inaccessible. When designing it, I took into consideration that 99% of my visitors arrive with >1024 pixel vertical resolution. I'm curious though: as a lifelong Mac user, is your 575px-tall browser window limited by your screen resolution?
Nope. It's limited by the fact that otherwise it covers up the rest of my workspace. (Though my sister until recently had a computer with an 800x600 resolution, which would also not be able to show the search box with all the toolbars on.)
And I didn't mean it as an attack or even a gripe: I mean that it's a lot of work to make a product where everything works perfectly for everyone, and even you fall short. You go further in many areas than most people, but that's just a question of where to draw the line on accessibility, not whether to draw it. IMO, if we want better accessibility, we need to make it easier for people to get further before they feel like they have to draw a line.
At least for me- I have not forgotten- it is just a matter of priority.
On such a small team working on such a large product, accessibility takes the back seat to other implementations. This is not my decision, and I do have issues with it, but I understand it as well.
Something I have always wondered though was why visitors would be frustrated on [insert your little site here] on a [insert your accessible device here], when such an important majority of the internet doesn't even work? Based on the link, I would think expectations are not very high.
While it would be great if every website were designed to be accessible, it isn't actually going to happen for various reasons.
What can be done and should happen is screen reader software can improve. If google can index Ajax websites, screen readers can be improved to handle them too. No other solution is realistic, or will do more to improve the usability of the web for the visually impaired.
Mark Pilgrim's http://www.diveintoaccessibility.org/ is a good starting point, though it's out of date (2002) with respect to the AJAX-y stuff that the post is talking about here.
Is the problem lack of awareness? It takes much more effort to caption or transcribe videos and make websites screenreader friendly than to use valid HTML and CSS. But when I ask about making something accessible, people are usually happy to oblige. I suspect it's because suddenly they realize part of their target audience needs it.