This came up at the hackers meetup in london last night. Its a matter of the extra dev time vs reach of audience, which varies from site to site, I would say o

This came up at the hackers meetup in london last night. Its a matter of the extra dev time vs reach of audience, which varies from site to site, I would say on average, I assume a reasonable resolution, with js and cookies enabled. I dont think every person crippling functionality to cater for the maximum possible market is a good thing for the individual sites or the industry in general. flickr came up as an example, but when flickr launched their 'organizr', you could count a handful of large sites that used heavy js / ajax interfaces, there were also a large number of photo sharing sites, while it wasnt the reason flickr won the photo sharing wars, providing an incredibly powerful and usable tool to let people work with their photos gave them a very good start. Obviously for some sites (wikipedia) catering for handicapped users provides a huge benefit with very little negative impact on the standard user. However I dont think a strict requirement, and if your application benefits a lot from scripted interface elements, go for it. If everyone sat and served static text pages. handicapped users will never get to enjoy the benefits of a fully featured scripted interface that will inevitably be created through new demand. http://ejohn.org/blog/ajax-accessibility/ http://ejohn.org/blog/ajax-accessibility/ is also worth a read