Sorry, I didn't actually address your point in my rush to be sarcastic. Mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.
You are absolutely correct and I think that quadriplegics can be used as a kind of Patient Zero for accessibility purposes, in that if you can make a widget/service/application/building that a quadriplegic can successfully use then all those other people you mentioned will probably be able to as well.
It means you have to solve one problem involving extreme disability, rather than taking each disability, infirmity, and just plain old being old as discrete and individual problems.
I used to work for a healthcare software company, we dealt with this a lot. In fact, it was probably our primary focus.
The problem with the sick, injured, and elderly is that they are all disabled in very different ways. Someone with a spinal injury will be operate completely differently than someone with a stroke. You'll put a control on the left side of the screen which will impact anyone who can't use their left hand. Then you'll move it to the bottom of the screen, but that will impact people with peripheral vision issues or dementia. Many solutions that work for one set of disabilities are mutually exclusive to other disabilities.
Color blindness and issues with sight are very difficult to get right (avoid blue... and red... and green...). Everything has to be big and bold and high contrast; your important call-to-action will be the same size as the link to your terms and conditions.
We built an app that required people with diabetes to take pictures of their feet. Ironically, when we went to trial, none of the patients were able to take pictures of their feet. People who suffer from diabetes tend to be a bit larger, and yeah... they can't really bend over or pickup their feet.
You can't build one app for everyone, you have to build 3 or 4 different versions that offer tailored features depending on the disabilities of that group. You need a design team that is accessibility focused, otherwise your developers are going to get a flat PNG of designs and have no idea how to implement the workflows for accessible users. It's incredibly expensive and you need talented people.
I say all this not to stop anyone from doing accessibility focused work, but just to give reasons why many companies a) do a shit job of it and b) don't spend much time on it. The sad reality is that many disabled people don't have expendable income, so they aren't really the focus of business efforts. The only reason I got to experience all of this work was because the government was directly funding our efforts.
Hi, I guess I really didn't articulate my point very well at all, sorry about that.
I think I was trying to articulate that solving one disability problem for one type of disability almost always has applications for people with other types of disabilities, a very simple example is ramps and widening doors for people in big wheelchairs. That wider door and ramp can also be used by people with other disabilities.
As you quite rightly point out there are no panaceas, there is no one application to suit everybody; that would be impractical. What companies could do more of is open up their API's so that people can solve their own problems, that way if the widget you've just bought doesn't quite fit your disability but has an open API the option exists for you to tailor it to your needs. This is how I fly my Parrot drone, it wasn't designed to enable disabled people to use but they left a little space I could solve my problems. Obviously not everyone has that ability, but with an open API other companies could create products and solutions for existing products and services.
I'm not sure I agree with you about the disposable income part of your argument, if we can work a big enough scale we can make things affordable. But to get there we need companies to spend a lot of money on as you quite rightly pointed out talent, time and treasure. And unfortunately only Apple seems to be even slightly moving in the right direction.
Also in the UK we have the NHS who has enormous purchasing power and would be totally willing to pay for low-cost devices that solve particular disability problems, that way those people don't take up expensive hospital beds. At the moment, it needs a giant amount of investment and as you also pointed out that's probably going to be governments if it's done at all.
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