As is our mission, we will do what we can to get companies, organizations, as well as individual developers to make their programs accessible to all parties using them. I've seen so much of this, and still it often seems like folks don't care one bit once they've decided on a development plan for their programs. It is clear that often times, the blind folks are not thought of at all. This has been the case for many years. Though things have improved greatly since the 1990's, there is still much work to be done in terms of accessibility standards. Though there is the ADA, as well as 508 compliance for web sites, it seems that too many folks are getting away with not following such simple rules. I can understand that some folks, like big corporations, they might not have time to deal with that, but if the smaller companies could, it would be a step in the right direction.
One problem, or misconception, I should say, that most people have is that it takes a lot more money to make programs accessible out of the box. In some situations, yes, indeed that might be true, but for those who develop in .net and use the tools that microsoft has kindly offered for this purpose, they are all set, and no extra money needs to be paid. Visual Studio 2010, both the free express version as well as the paid-for professional version, has beautiful property dialogues where one can edit the labels of buttons, menu items, and toolbars. The really fascinating thing about this is the fact that no code needs to be typed into the code edeitor window to make these changes take effect. For those of you who prefer to code everything by hand, which is quite a few of us these days, you do have to worry about the code behind the formatting. I want to tell you that I am most experienced (with what little experience i yet have), in .net, so most of my programming comments will be based on those languages. This is just an example of how easy accessibility is to implement in programs. There are even ways to make custom controls accessible and natively readable by screen readers, and as I learn more, I'll blog more about that in the future. Keep an eye out!