Individual programs may be bad, but the toolkits support it.
Here, none of the cross platform toolkits seem to even have the most basic support.
- For-profit organizations have little incentives to develop accessible software or they have to make it prohibitively expensive - Open Source development is usually "itch my scratch"-driven (as the author points out) and the pool of people who are both motivated by their own plight and able to develop solutions for them are very few.
I think this is the main reason why the best accessibility frameworks are made by companies that are already far away from their bottom line and can afford to do the work at their own expense.
MS may or may not care, but accessibility is often a requirement for government contracts (or buisnesses who want government contracts) so it's a good sales feature for them, even if something if a checkbox feature. They work very hard at t too.
But the end result is that both of them work really hard on accessibility and everyone benefits.
Apple (from what I have heard MS too) really does amazing work in accessibility but this would not be possible had they not had enough resources. I can understand why understaffed open source projects do not allocate more resources to accessibility.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/david-pogue-on-iphone-voiceov...
I've noticed that the w3c is starting to push hard on improving the status quo, especially during the last few months. The latest WAI-ARIA Authoring Practices draft [0] is superb. It includes examples, documentation on the different keyboard interactions, and suggested aria properties.
As the documentation quality increases, it gets easier to raise awareness among developers. My experience has generally been that once you raise the point and you provide a clearly defined solution, many people are happy to make changes. For example, I've occasionally convinced friends with inaccessible video to either publish transcripts or write articles / blogs with the equivalent knowledge.