I thought this was an interesting display of how we really do read visually. When turned upside-down, we don’t read an image the same as we do right side up.
http://www.exploratorium.edu/exhibits/mona/mona.html
It would also be interesting to see what visually impaired people see when looking at a screen–or to try to understand how vision impaired people access information in some sort of simulation. Describing an experience is totally different form feeling it. And it’s hard to understand how much we take for granted in the presentation of information, without looking at it from another perspective. That’s why I really enjoyed the WebAim simulation. When you listen to the screen reader, its clear why file names are important (as it reads filenames with numbers in the millions-totally useless information), and should be considered part of the information of your page, not just something in the-back end.
Perhaps this already exists, but it would be cool to have a simulation station, where you could plug in different variables to experience your website from different perspectives, and also optimize to chosen criteria. But in the end, I think a lot of criteria for good web design should already include accessibility, and that we shouldn’t consider it an add-on or favor
Adaptions you make for one group will likely be useful for another, and thus modifications are not ability-specific. For example, for low vision readers you could have extra rich description of images (imagine museum curator narrated alternate text) ). But there are probably many users who would want the same features even if they don’t have vision problems, if they use a screen reader for other reasons.
It seems to me that w3c validation should have minimum requirements for all ability users, to make web design inclusive from the beginning.
