Two things: 1. Actually, that wasn't a made-up scenario. 2. Does Slashdot use JavaScript? Am I writing a comment to this post? Am I blind? I'm thinking those answers are "I imagine so", "yes", and "yes", respectively. I'm not entirely sure where you're getting the information that states that you have to have the Blind and Sighted versions of a site. Most accessibility consultants worth their salt would throw that idea out, precisely for the reasons you specify. Two sites mean twice the manpower, twice the maintenance—and I tend to avoid the "site optimized for screen readers" for just that reason. Are the regulations specifically calling out that you should avoid JavaScript or dynamic content? If they are, then I side with you and the idea that not using 21st century technology is an unreasonable demand, and that the affected population need to be dragged kicking and screaming into the new millennium.

I'm actually curious ... for all that people have been commenting on businesses being closed due to ADA lawsuits, not one person has been kind enough to cite an example. Could you provide one?

Wait a second. You just stated that you stopped serving him not because he was blind, but because he was an ass. This is understandable, and I applaud you for making that distinction. Yet, in the same paragraph, you seem to imply that, were I to come into your hardware store, I would be judged at least in part by your experiences with this one person?

A related story: I was flying from Seattle to Las Vegas via Austin once. Per some unspoken regulation I have no clue of, they had alerted the Austin ground crew that an OMGBLIND! person was on this flight, and could they provide what they felt was the necessary assistance?

This consisted of someone with a wheelchair. The logical thing to do there seemed to be for me to jog towards the gate for my connecting flight. When she had informed me that ".. the last blind person needed the wheelchair" (doing, as seems to have been illustrated above, the exact same thing—judging all by the one), I'd casually informed her that that was wonderful, as the last woman I talked to prefered women, and if she would be so good as to contact her girlfriend, I'd gladly take the wheelchair.

... OK, I take back the uncertainty I had previously about you judging all by the one. That, right there, was a definite example. Does this mean that, if a black person makes a condescending statement such as, for instance, that I should stay in my house rather than be out in public, I should hate all black people? A bit extreme, yes?

I'm a bit confused as to your use of "compassion" here, as it seems to imply the view that the disabled as an entire population are suffering from some sort of affliction, and improving access is equivalent to putting a tenner in the Salvation Army kettle at Christmas. Ludicrous examples such as Braille street signs aside, peradventure it's the attitude that disabled people are patients, sick, incapable of equal participation when given equal access, that made these measures necessary in the first place.

Women, damn those equal pay laws. Black people—I imagine it cost some money to retrofit places of public accommodations so there were no more "colored water fountains". Anyone that doesn't speak English in America (since it takes man hours to add a new language to a product, a street sign, a website). Working mothers (those breastfeeding rooms in workplaces that support them weren't free, I imagine).

I have to agree on the "very little guidance being given". As I found myself doing accessibility testing on thick client software and websites in addition to my usual testing, I'd seen instances where folks followed precisely what was in their developer docs, or implemented accessibility after having spent maybe three to five minutes with accessibility tools (usually because of a lack of high quality user acceptance testing in the accessibility field). Again, I can't speak as much for architectural barriers, but for access to normally visually presented information, I totally concur that more guidance and documentation needs to be made available. Two things that this makes me wonder--first, if the government is going to implement these regulations, are they going to provide grants for smaller companies to bring their sites up to code? Second, as these regulations become more widespread, would it not make sense that the tools needed to implement them would become more common, and thus we'd see an end to the need to retrofit existing technology?

Seems to me the extra cost could be avoided if "the handicapped" weren't seen as "too handicapped to use anything other than essential services" from the beginning. It takes no more man hours for me to test a website for accessibility than it would for J. Random Tester to test that same website. It takes three extra seconds at design time to set btnNewFile.AutomationProperties.AutomationName to "new" whilst your UX designer designs an appropriately flashy image (hint: an advantage to decoupling the visual UI from the ... nonvisual UI? ... is that the nonvisual UI can be as pretty as it needs to be without affecting the nonvisual UI). The reason that adaptation costs so much is that the market didn't make these decisions from the beginning—and this is coming from someone who used to do independent contract work retrofitting software for accessibility before I took a position in the mainstream software industry. For the sake of numbers, let's assume the following: A call center for a major player in the mobile phone industry hires me to retrofit their software, at a cost of $75 per hour over a 40 hour week, twice annually. Cost to them: $6,000. Let's say that this modification made ... 10 people employable that wouldn't otherwise be. Supplemental security income pays ... let's call it $650 to make my life easier, and let's not take into account cost of living adjustments. So, not counting the medical costs, those ten people would be drawing $678,000 worth of taxpayer dollars were it not for those six thousand dollars spent on software accommodations. I'm ... having a little trouble with your rather terse cost/benefit analysis, although I admit a certain bias here.

Actually, by and large, I tend to find the Braille on ATMs singularly useless. See, here's the thing: the Braille is part of the buttons. The function of the buttons (particularly along the side of the screen) change based on context. The "A" on the upper right button is still an "A", whether that button is Withdraw, Checking, or Yes. If you've noticed a headphone jack on most ATMs, that allows for the use of a text to speech interface that walks the user through a transaction. Actually, another reason I find the Braille on ATMs annoying at this point is because I then have to correct mistaken assumptions, because apparently I can't stand for someone to be wrong on the Internet. ... Boy am I in the wrong place.

I'm afraid I'm going to have to refute your argument here (see inline). In the interest of disclosure, I should probably mention I'm blind. But anyway, to the substance of your post.

I think another poster more knowledgeable as to the technology vis a vis the deaf punched a hole in that, so I'll defer to the expert there.

Can you think of another minority to which a broad array of what you'd call non-essential services are denied? As an example, we'll take the on-demand service provided by my cable company. There is absolutely no way I can access that service through my set top box without having someone sighted present ... which translates, really, to "no way that I can access the service through my set top box". Unfortunately, "letting the market decide" there is a bit problematic, since a large chunk of that market, and a large chunk of various television providers, think that blind people don't watch TV. If I had to wait for the collective ignorance of a society that generally defecates themselves when faced with my condition, or generally finds my navigating our local public transit system to get to work of a morning "an inspiration", to catch up with reality, I'd be waiting a couple of centuries.

Oh, wonderful comparison. I'll not spell out the differences between lack of access because of a safety issue (no one with bones that fragile should be bungee jumping) and lack of access because of an ignorance issue (But wait! That iPhone has a touch screen! Wouldn't you rather have a special phone for the blind?)

Why not?

There needs to be an equivalent to "Godwin's Law" to describe the invocation of either blind people driving (impossible due to current technological limitations) or blind people watching TV (possible, but assumed to be impossible) when these discussions come up. Looking at this logically, which you've completely failed to do here, if there were a means for blind people to be able to drive (cf. Google's self-driving cars), wouldn't it be more cost-effective to use, say, existing GPS infrastructure, already established map providers, and other existing technology? The navigation system to mitigate the lack of ability to see street signs is already in place (it's what allows me to download a map, copy it to my phone, and travel anywhere I take a notion).

Again, that presupposes that the site's creator even presumes that blind people can use the Web. I'd wager that, until about five seconds before you read these words, the idea of a blind software developer was completely beyond your comprehension. In fact, I expect you still figure I use a Braille keyboard, or talk my code to my computer (actually, you probably don't now, given that by implication I just called that out as wrong). Until "The Market" isn't at least partially influenced by people that think I just stand there pathetically waiting for someone to help me across the street unless the traffic light makes that stupid beepbeep noise, I'd have a hard time letting the market decide.

Because of the cost of production. Commercial Braille production is expensive, expensive machinery. Further, apparently something like 10% of totally blind people (or some depressing number like that) read Braille.