Sometimes I have a hunch that inaccessibility is what costs money. A basic informative HTML web page is cheap to write and host. The deluge of swirling graphics, icons, and microscopic pull-downs, are what cost money to create.
Yes, if you make a mess and bring in some accessibility compliance people that have to suggest all kinds of shitty workarounds it will cost you money. If your devs don't know why those shitty workarounds are there they will break it all again in a next release. If you just use semantic HTML from the start you'll have a more robust product and less maintenance in the long run.
Oh, and ARIA rule one: don't use ARIA, use the native HTML equivalent.
Rule two: Only use ARIA if you can't express your intent in native HTML and make sure you know what your code is doing, don't just copy paste some ARIA example from another project or random site, lots of ARIA in the wild is wrong.
I'm a blind developer and accessibility consultant. Accessibility consulting is a good business to have these days, but I hope my work will be obsolete one day :).
Basic web pages are less appealing to the mainstream, so they capture fewer eyeballs there.
Example: https://www.debian.org/ is a simple website, designed for broad accessibility, but it doesn't look 'slick'. If you were looking to choose an OS, this website wouldn't make you go 'wow'.
To me, a website is a tool to get something done. I don't want a website that "wows" me. If you really want to wow me, then you are likely trying to sell me something that I probably don't want.
Accessibility is about letting people get shit done, not marketing to them.
If basic webpages 'sold', then marketers would use them. Webpages that 'wow' work, that's why people use them. It's not based on gut feelings either - there's lots of research in the area, for example A/B testing.
People say they don't want shitty news either, but the news that is most popular is pretty low quality, sensationalist tripe.
Your missing my point: If your goal for a webpage is to sell, then glwt. I get that they are a thing, but they are pretty useless to me, and good luck making marketing material that excludes people that want to give you money.
Webpages to me are tools, not marketing material. If you want to use them for marketing, then great! Just don't waste my time trying to turn a tool into marketing material.
Webpages that are meant to be useful (like Debian makes, etc) should be accessible, not promotional. The webpages I use are tools to get a job done, not to browse for advertisements.
> and good luck making marketing material that excludes people that want to give you money.
You're completely missing my point. Web pages are the way they are because they pull eyeballs. You are a single data point. You don't like slick webpages? Fine, you're an outlier. There are people out there that don't go online at all. They're also an outlier. You each find niches to cater to you, but you're not the majority case, and if you're interested in eyeballs for whatever reason, then dealing with the majority case is in your interests.
It's not just marketing either. Compare Arch's wiki (simple Mediawiki) to Debian's. Mediawiki is more complex than Debian's simple pages, yet it is far more readable. Even as 'just a tool, not marketing'[1], this heavier webpage is a better webpage.
[1] marketing isn't just selling stuff. for example, plenty of free software projects provide giveaways to conferences to raise their profile
