I find it antagonistic on the OP's part to call this response "hostile": “we know it’s inaccessible, but we are not fixing it”. That's not hostile, it's honest. What more could you ask for than honesty?
If they had responded “we know it’s inaccessible, but we are not fixing it, because people with disabilities are a drain on society and should be put down”, that would be hostile.
Also: “it would be too hard,” (universally incorrect) is just not true. Unless his standard is "nothing is too hard for this noble cause."
To be fair, a significant number of his complaints could have been solved by turning JPEGs into text or adding labels to a few buttons. In several cases, he gave them the exact fix required and they still refused or ignored him.
> What more could you ask for than honesty?
An attempt to fix the problem or raise the issue with someone that can.
Why should they change their design for one person ? Maybe websites should start having one version for people with sight and one all text version for the blind. I think it's kind of dumb to make it so people can't use images embedded with text. What about art or multimedia sites ?
There's a lot more than one blind person out there, most of whom would simply never do business with them without letting them know.
And it's not all images that are a problem, just those that are images of large blocks of text, like the restaurant menu that was given as an example. If it's a short bit of text like a logo, that's what ALT tags are for.
When there's the entire menu full of text as an image, that's just plain bad design. It's worse for everyone and it won't even get indexed by search engines. Text should be text. It's just easier that way.
If they had responded “we know it’s inaccessible, but we are not fixing it, because people with disabilities are a drain on society and should be put down”, that would be hostile.
Also: “it would be too hard,” (universally incorrect) is just not true. Unless his standard is "nothing is too hard for this noble cause."