[fredleblanc]

Absolutely, because not all disabilities are permanent. They can broken into lifelong disabilities, acquired, temporary, situational, and chronic (potentially among others). Just think of how many people who can hear still use captioning on their TVs. Or how easy your website is to reading on a phone during a bright, sunny day. Or how usable your stuff is for someone holding a child in one arm. Accessibility (and thus, WCAG’s success criteria) helps everyone.

I don’t think it’s unusual that creators who have thought about accessibility have also thought a lot about UX, etc. So there may be some correlation there. But as others have posted, while there are some criteria more targeted at those using assistive technology (like screen readers), there are just as many things helping everyone else.

Besides all that, none of us are getting younger, and with age comes reduced mobility, dexterity, sight, hearing, etc. You never know what tomorrow brings. Someone who self-identifies as having no disabilities today may have a different experience tomorrow.

But then again, web accessibility is what I do for a living, so of course I’m a bit biased. :)

[jakub_g]

Famous pic about situational disabilities:

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/xamarin/wp-content/uploads/si...

(Google keyword: "microsoft inclusive design situational accessibility"; ironically, the canonical image comes from a guideline at https://www.microsoft.com/design/inclusive/ which is a PDF -- nowhere as accessible as web)

> people who can hear still use captioning on their TVs

Something that is rarely mentioned: foreigners who are learning the language. Captions are a turbo booster of learning, without them it can take years to understand what's up in TV when you're learning from zero.

[fredleblanc]

Absolutely! Low literacy and illiteracy effects about 2 billion people in the world, and can include everyone using your primary language as their secondary language. Even if they’re getting by with running your site through Google Translate or whatever, the less you write in complex concepts, jargon, or regional idioms, the more likely they’ll be able to accurately comprehend your message.

And Microsoft’s toolkit is wonderful. My favorite part of working in accessibility for [big company] is that we don’t have business rivals in the a11y space. Everyone is in it to get better together.

Good accessibility is too often a competitive advantage in web products, when it should be the standard.

[tick_tock_tick]

> Just think of how many people who can hear still use captioning on their TVs.

I've given up on hearing people talk clearly in most shows and movies. Sound mixing is horrible and seems to be getting worse! The music should not be just as load as the speaker!!!!

[InitialLastName]

This might just be the mix (and there might be second-order effects such as the mix changing as the mix engineers and producers get younger), but your ability to differentiate voices from background sound also depreciates as you age. The music can be substantially quieter than the background and still cause issues for people with age-related hearing loss (which is roughly universal), especially as they start to lose the higher harmonics that help us distinguish vocal sounds.

[runarberg]

I often use a hypothetical case of a user who’s mouse just ran out of batteries when trying to pitch how important keyboard accessibility is. Most of the time my bosses become empathetic towards that situation.