[jerf]

Yes. Off the top of my head, I know of at least four different types of color blindness (from red-green all the way down to total monochromatic vision), total blindness, significant visual impairment (listed separately from blindness due to different accommodations), deafness, significant motor impairment making navigation difficult, and dyslexia (which there are ways of accommodating).

Thinking about what it takes to make an IE7 user happy is easy; you just install IE7 and bash on your site until it works. Thinking about all those requirements... it's hard to look at that pile of requirements without recoiling in horror at the size of the task... at least, if you want to do anything else on your site, too. Something as simple as a single drop-down menu colored a bit "cleverly" and you've potentially whacked everyone on that list up there except the deaf. Consequently, I disagree entirely with the idea that it's just a matter of using simple HTML or something... it's actually a matter of choosing to give up on everything fancy, and that's a much harder sell.

[hengheng]

Remember these people are cooperating with you. They are living with their disabilities full-time, and they might have found some remarkably clever ways to get along with it. I've seen blind people with iPhones (I have no idea), and a kid who used his wheelchair as a tractor to pull machinery around his parents' farm. You can work with these people, they're smart.

Whether you make your site fully screen-reader compatible is up to you, but enabling some simple hacks (e.g. custom stylesheets, browser zooming) really goes a long way. People are not homogenous anyway, so it's a good idea to not narrow down their path, impairment or not. Some people don't like to read as much, some are confused by complex looking graphics, some like animation while others are easily distracted. You need to provide different access paths anyways, at least in many of the more complex cases.

Personally I love reading large bunches of text, but I usually hate videos where I can't go at my own pace. I'd happily read transcripts if I could, but providing video only would lose you a visitor. Incidentally providing transcripts also helps with accessibility.

[DanBC]

> Whether you make your site fully screen-reader compatible is up to you, but enabling some simple hacks (e.g. custom stylesheets, browser zooming) really goes a long way.

Yes! It isn't as if "please don't use horrible fonts; please choose high contrast colours; please allow zooming" is some onerous difficult to follow arcane ruleset.

[mwcampbell]

> I've seen blind people with iPhones (I have no idea)

Video demonstrating how blind people use iOS devices: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vIQWyp13beE

[lilsunnybee]

It should at least be standard for web programmers to develop with the most common disabilities in mind, like different types of hearing and visual impairment. In many cases it would often be trivial for a lot of sites to better accommodate screen readers, maintain usability at larger font sizes, zoom levels, etc. if it was a design consideration from the start. A lot of accommodations also improve the experience for users on different types of devices, in situations in which sound is inappropriate, etc. But because it's not a priority or a standard, things which could easily be accessible are not, and we are making modern life more difficult for others simply through carelessness and a lack of concern.

[mikeash]

You don't have to give up on fancy stuff. You just have to ensure that you don't rely on fancy stuff. Which many of us think is a good idea anyway.

For example, it's fine to use color to convey information as long as that information can also be obtained in other ways. This approach not only makes your stuff usable to the colorblind, but makes it easier for regular folk too.