Web 2.0 Hype or Hapiness Response

This article brought up a lot of good points about accessibility problems surrounding the Internet and Web 2.0 applications. The author brought up technical, mental, and physical issues with accessibility, however, I feel that two of those three arguments are somewhat irrelevant.

The Internet is an extremely technical entity. It seems like everyday there is some new application or a new feature that looks to be the next big thing. The nature of Internet is to advance its technical features, and this can sometimes leave some users in the dust with their slow download times and their out-of-date PC's. To me, this is not a legitimate reason to slow or "dumb-down" the Internet. I'm not saying people should load up their sites with as much content as possible, but applications like facebook, twitter, digg, etc. really don't take an extremely long time to load. Even on a 56K modem, the only thing that takes a painfully long time are videos, and that's just simply unavoidable. From a web developers standpoint, I feel that the users who are reluctant to upgrade their technology are also the users who don't particularly care to use it, so why should a developer spend countless hours making a site more accessible when those people with 56K modems probably won't make use of it? In my experience, the users who do update their technology and do use the services are the ones who lose out, because that time spent making sites accessible could be spend improving the features that already exist.

From a mental standpoint, the article talks about old people being less inclined to try out new technologies. Is this really a developers responsibility? Again, from a developers standpoint, my job is to create software and applications that work as they've been designed. Making software more appealing to older generations really sounds like something for the marketing department, not the developers.

The last argument this paper made was the physical disconnection in Web 2.0. Well, they've got me there. The world of physical disabilities and 3rd party interpreting hardware (screen readers, etc.) is an absolute mess. The bottom line is that the internet is an extremely interactive medium, and those who's interaction is disabled in a certain way are bound to experience some limitations. Until more regulations are set in place for developers and third party software and hardware, this is an aspect of the web that i don't see drastically improving in the near future.