[jscholes]

> I’m absolutely certain there are plenty of NFB members who will gladly provide free screen reader accessibility testing for apps they use if the developer is responsive to feedback.

You could be right, but keep in mind that this may not significantly lower the amount of time required for developers to understand and remediate problems. Users have wildly differing levels of technical experience, so you may end up with plenty of feedback that you then have to spend hours understanding, sorting, de-duplicating and following up on.

Not to mention the fact that, bluntly, users who aren't being paid as "experts" just may not be that willing to shit all over your product. I have encountered more than one case of a limited subset of screen reader users reporting a positive experience with a component which broke every rule in the book, and caused very real problems for users outside of that core group.

[jareds]

As a totally blind back-end developer I'm sure I'd be one of those people. If I'm doing accessibility testing for development tools my thoughts are probably worth while. If I'm doing accessibility testing for a bank my thoughts are probably less valuable. Unless it's horribly broken I'm tech savvy enough to usually get by. I don't expect all blind people to have 20 years of programming experience and the general technical aptitude that comes along with that.