For the last 10 weeks my son has been in a school starters programme. While he is a "normal" child who just has to learn to sit still and chose which hand to hold his pencil (he's ambidextrous), many of the children have serious problems.
The children's disabilities ranged between:
* MS
* Autism
* Cerebral Palsy
It was a huge wake up call for me as a designer. The school starters programme with it 100 children is publicly funded. Places were highly fought over. It was one of 50 running in Sydney, with many more privately funded groups of similar nature.
So as a rough estimate in Sydney over 4,000 5 year olds will need some "help" accessing the web some time in the future.
Since then I have spent time re-reading the
W3C accessibility guidelines and trying to implement them in all my work. It would be great if you all did the same.
Note: The group didn't work with low vision or blind children and only included problems which were picked up by early intervention so the figure of 4,000 in reality will be a lot higher.