Accessibility is not "All or Nothing"

[Wlauzon]

It seems like much of the accessibility debate has centered around "all or nothing" issues, like text to speech for the blind etc.

But very little attention has been paid to what I guess you could call "marginally disabled" or "visually challenged".

For example, a lot (billions!) of people do not have perfect eyesight, or perfect color vision, yet time after time I see sites with 6px sized text, blue on blue navigation links, and similar.

IMO, accessibility designing should include all of those factors to some extent.

And just for information, here is an excellent color blind test for web pages - try it out on a few and you might be surprised. I found a couple of popular sites that are almost unreadable for some common types of color blindness.

[colorfilter.wickline.org...]

I ended up adjusting a few colors on our main site using that.

[DrDoc]

Your assertions are absolutely correct -- the debate (or at least general perceived purpose of accessibility) always seems to focus on an all-or-nothing approach. I don't care if you don't go "all out" to build a 100% accessible site. At least do something. Acknowledge that you see accessibility as important.

And, yes, too often the focus seems to be on those who are completely blind or deaf (or whatever it might be) when the problem of marginal impairments is quite large.

Hopefully this forum will help set those things straight :)