"Ottawa ordered to make its websites more accessible to visually impaired"

I'm feeling a little conflicted in my views about this story.

First off, the article states that "There are about 800,000 Canadians who are visually impaired". Seems a little bit high, unless you're basically looking at just the elderly as the definition doesn't appear to include those whose vision can be fixed up with glasses (like me). If talking about the elderly, would that explain why they might not be accessing stuff such as job banks quite as often?

On one hand, you've got the government's argument in court:

... that federal services are available in other ways, such as on the telephone, in person and by mail and that it is unlikely that the Internet can be perfectly accessible to all, given that there are more than 23 million pages under the domain of gc.ca

How many alternative means do you need to access the same information? Would you be able to access the same information more quickly and effectively using the phone (although I'm guessing you might be restricted to accessing it during business hours)? Similarly the article notes that "international reports on online accessibility give conflicting opinions on how Canada rates on the international scale," and notes that "the government, in 2007, updated its standards so that visually impaired individuals can use screen readers to access government sites." Apparently they didn't go far enough according to this ruling.

On the other hand:

The ruling noted there are "basic accessibility problems," such as a lack of text descriptions to permit blind users to access video, and a failure to provide alternatives to several technologies, such as "flash," which cannot be decoded by many screen readers.

How commonplace are these videos? How much of the missing tags might be figured out by simply listening to the first few seconds of the video? (Although, that said, having ALT tags for things is generally a good idea). That, and flash annoys me. I do run with flashblock installed, and that doesn't seem to pose problems for the vast majority of websites. How often does this stuff crop up?