I agree with 90% of your comments Dan. My post was not aimed at people who would prefer to author accessible sites but who are hampered by the demands of their job. It was directed at the notion that there is such a corner of the web whose sites are only relevant to disabled people, and conversely that disabled people are only interested in that corner of the web. People who can't, for whatever reason, use a visual browser have just as much right to be able to access, for example, Target's online store as short people or blondes. (Refer to the Target vs. NFB suit and ensuing debate on Derek Featherstone's blog, amongst others for examples of the intransigent attitudes of developers who don't see this as a fundamental social equity problem.)

As for the time it takes to make your site accessible, yes, if you're a large retailer that's invested everything in table-based layouts, IE and image maps then it will cost you a lot of money to shift towards universal access. But some of the things that would enable disabled people to access web sites more readily are so trivial to achieve that the best answer as to why they are so commonly overlooked is ignorance, or perhaps outright bigotry. Judging by some of the comments made over the Target affair (which, to be clear, was not at all the subject of my original post, nor or course your own comments) there are a lot of web developers out there who think that if you can't see you should just shut up and have a friend drive you to the bricks and mortar store.

So in the immortal words of The Dude, and George H. W. Bush before him, "This aggression will not stand, man." I know there are challenges, but I think it's important that the web developer community does not dismiss them lightly.