“When “accessibility” means comprehensive and continuous compliance with standards, the positive energy around concern for people and striving for improvement gets spent finding and fixing bugs.”
“…we see first-hand the shortcomings of approaching accessibility as solely a standards compliance activity. Standards have a key role in defining and measuring progress toward accessibility. Standards are a guide for identifying and repairing accessibility issues. But in many cases, standards compliance is a narrow way to define accessibility, particularly with large, distributed systems and environments.”
“We see an important role for process standards related to recordkeeping and reporting to ensure accessibility efforts focus on people and are pointed in the direction of success.”
Essentially it comes back to whether or not developers care and empathise with the users of the product they create. If you work to make the best product you can for you users then you will need to cater for their needs. Accessibility is a big part of that.
Further reading: Measuring accessibility | DingoAccess | Roger Hudson, November 2011 – An article by Richard Hudson an Australian expert