I've heard seemingly reasonable people argue in favor of excluding people with disabilities from their sites. Sure, if only 1 percent of all browsers hitting your site are text browsers, and you've no current personal need for assistive technology (like me), and you have tons of bandwidth (like we do at HotWired), you might not see the immediate benefits of catering to 1 percent of your visitors. But making sites universally accessible is easy, cost effective, and in concert with Web design fundamentals.
There are thousands of hardware and software products for computer users with physical disabilities, but you don't have to become an expert in assistive technologies to create an accessible Web site. All you have to do is one thing: Make your documents navigable by text browsers.
Most assistive technologies - screen readers, voice-recognition software, touchscreens, Braille readers, and speech synthesizers - grab output as ASCII characters. The fact that most of these technologies were developed before the GUI - when command-line interface ruled the computer world - means these devices work well with a structural markup language like HTML.
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