Most of the comments seem to be missing a very important point from the post: > As a blind user, I can write a special mode which does something specific, say,

Most of the comments seem to be missing a very important point from the post: > As a blind user, I can write a special mode which does something specific, say, implement an IRC client. Almost all my work can instantaneously be used by sighted people using their graphical toolkit. This goes well beyond the ability of the author to create software that is accessible for both sighted and blind users. It is stating that support for both audiences is handled elegantly by the same toolkit, so you aren't creating an adversarial situation where serving the needs of both groups of people requires some form of compromise in the user interface or necessitating significantly more effort. (I would imagine that some care is required, but Emacs developers are going to address it anyhow since the program is intended to run in graphical and non-graphical environments.) I suspect this support of multiple environments is part of the reason why there is an esoteric collection of applications that run within Emacs. As an example: it is possible to read ebooks in Emacs, with formatting and images being supported in X and gracefully handled in a terminal.