Everyone can benefit from Accessibility (occasionally)
It's a sunny afternoon, and I'm in the in-law's garden making use of their wifi to catch up with some email and websites. And I'm reminded that accessibility functionality is often useful for those of us who don't need it all the time.
Case in point, right now the sun is quite a bit brighter than my screen. If I take my sunglasses off and squint, I can just about make things out. But if I up the font size, and invert the display to white on black then I can read and type comfortably.
This in turn reminds me of a meeting I attended several years ago, which happened to be about the merits of various methods of sizing text on a webpage. Someone had prepared some notes intended for display on a screen. Unfortunately, the screen was a little too small for the room, and thanks to IE's inflexible rendering of text sized in pixels, the notes were unreadable. If I recall correctly, this somewhat undermined his argument that we didn't need to worry about the problems that arise when you use pixels to size text.
More recently, I've seen the zoom functionality of Mac OS X being used increasingly often, either to get a closer look at something, or to increase the size of part of the display so it's visible from the other side of the room.
Even if you have 20-20 vision and hearing, it's a good idea to have a poke around the accessibility functions of your operating system and browser, as they can be really useful. And it's worth remembering working on accessibility isn't always just for visually impaired users.