When you get right down to it, the goal of accessible website development is to ensure that your entire site is usable. By everyone. By everything.
Okay, maybe not everything. Human and machine. We’ll leave the rocks and minerals to sort out their own computing issues.
So why is this important? Well, a usable site gets used. Sounds like I’m stating the obvious, doesn’t it? If you’ve spent more than five minutes on the Web, you’ll realize I’m not. Setting aside the issue of accessibility (which I believe is a big part of usability), most sites are designed without the end user in mind. The focus is on…well, I don’t know what the focus is; all I can assume is that the person trying to access, buy, or read the site wasn’t considered by the design team.