Inclusive Technologies

For its players, Second Life provides a virtual world for social interaction and entertainment.  It’s even being used for conferences and college education.  But you’ve got to see and work a mouse pretty well to use it.  Now a clever programmer has developed another way to access Second Life, via text instead.  It uses AJAX, so it may not be completely accessible; that wasn’t her goal in writing the text interface — she did it to eliminate the long delays caused by the graphics-rich standard interface.  But here’s the point: Second Life opened its software environment so thousands could write kool kode; among those thousands at least one person did at least one thing that makes the whole experience more accessible.  Is such an approach to accessibility sufficient?  Can we rely on happenstance to eliminate any and all barriers?  If not, where can we expect accessibility to pop up on its own, and where must we make other plans?
AjaxLife - Second Life In Your Web Browser | Metaversed