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Eric Jordan:
This is an interesting question for me, since many people in the Web industry would probably tell you that I am the last person you should pose this question to. I consider myself a “liberal” when it comes to accessibility and/or usability, as I typically opt for giving the designer and/or information architect the freedom to decide how much attention should be paid to usability, if any.

I can, however, tell you that in the course of running a professional Web Design Studio, I have come to learn that you cannot simply ignore these types of issues and run around designing websites like a cowboy, winging it as you go. It all depends on the type of project, the type of client, the target market, and the collective views of everyone involved in the project as to how closely you follow the standards of accessibility and usability.

Working with my team over the course of the past year, many issues have been brought to my attention that do indeed have an impact on the success of a project, whereas before I would have tended to dismiss them. I give a lot of credit to my team for this. Some issues are more important than others of course, depending on the particular situation, therefore it is tough to peg general rules that apply to every website, but there are some common standards that everyone should try to adhere to. Some of the standards we try to follow are as follows:

First, you should never assume that Flash should be crammed down the audience’s throat, unless you really understand the audience. It is a fact that not everyone loves Flash. Being a Flash advocate, it is an issue that I wrestle with time and time again, but is a fact nonetheless. What 2Advanced started doing about 3 years ago, is providing people with a “turn flash off” button. This allows for the user to load an alternate version of the site where any flash components have been replaced with html counterparts. We try to recommend this to as many clients as we can, although some are reluctant for various reasons such as budget constraints, time concerns, etc.. It takes extra resources and money to build the alternate metaphors. However, we have received very positive feedback regarding sites that we have deployed this feature on.

Another fundamental usability/accessibility nightmare is the use of frames. It took us a while to learn this lesson, but I can say that of all the websites we have developed in the past 3 years, I cannot recall one that made use of frames. Frames essentially breach the model that Web is built on: a system of pages with a unique URL. Frames go against this fundamental principle, making pages no longer an atomic unit of information. I know what you are thinking: “Well then doesn’t Flash break that same principle?” It did, until recently. Before, the information in Flash movies could only be accessed from the top layer of information and navigating down to it. One of our aims in 2006 at 2Advanced was to develop a system of deep-linking into flash movies that could be directly accessed from a unique web URL. We implemented this system in the latest version of our website, “Attractor”. We have been recommending it to our clients ever since (to those who have the budget for it of course).

Another error that many websites typically make when it comes to usability, is allowing the important content to get lost in the presentation. A large part of our ongoing adoption of (reasonable) standards is simply the separation of the content layer from the presentation layer. As a Flash-heavy studio, we search for every opportunity to improve the delivery of important information and not allow it to get lost in the wiz-bang of Flash. For this reason, we almost always push some sort of hybrid design, a marriage of Flash and HTML that best serves the user, by enhancing their experience from a design/aesthetic perspective and still allowing them easy and intuitive access to important information. This also improves SEO rankings, thus achieving the best of all worlds; a slick design, easy access to information, and great rankings with search engines.
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Jakob Nielsen:
The biggest accessibility problem is definitely low-literacy users, because they constitute 40% of the population. Most current websites are much too complicated for this big group of people who can't understand the information that's being presented. Sadly, nobody cares about low literacy. I have one consulting client that does, but otherwise there has been zero interest in our research on usability for low-literacy users.

The second biggest problem is older users, who are about 15% of the population. They have a lot of special issues related to the human aging process, including reduced eyesight, precision of movement, and memory. Again, almost nobody cares about this large (and rich, I might add) group of users. The usability guidelines to support older users is one of our least-selling reports. It's fascinating to conduct user research with seniors, so I don't regret doing these projects, but it's sad that so few companies care about the findings. Many websites could increase their sales substantially if only they would start catering to older users.

The W3C issues are certainly important as well, but they are not the most important ones because they focus on the technology instead of human needs. Yes, the technology should work, and I am grateful that somebody takes care of that. We definitely need standards so that when a user goes to a website, the headline will display if using a visual browser or be read aloud if using an auditory browser. But what should that headline say? Can people comprehend it? Do they understand where they are and what the product does that you are trying to sell them? Those are usability questions that should be resolved though user research, not technology standards.

Lynda Weinman:
The biggest culprits: text size that can’t be altered, lack of alt tags and text labels, using graphics for text instead of markup, exclusive use of multimédia, lack of contrast in color. Usability issues include unclear navigation, bad search or no search, and no contact information. I care about the issues personally—yes. I think everyone will be forced to care eventually. Right now Target is being sued because their site isn’t accessible. If that case wins, my suspicion is that major corporate websites and smaller sites alike will scramble to become compliant.
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Matt Mullenweg:
The biggest problems I have with most websites is bad typography, overly small type, and lack of clear navigation. I care deeply about the W3C, and I'm a member of the Web Standards Project. Sometimes the organization can be fairly opaque and academic, but I would never even consider a developer who isn't familiar with the specs where they absolutely nail it, like CSS 2.1 and XHTML 1.0.

Nick Finck:
On an accessibility level it's often things like pages that are only accessible via JavaScript or information that is not captioned or otherwise accessible in a Flash file. Those are the more common ones but others such as tab order come up once you start looking at common accessibility issues in web applications. On a usability level there are hundreds. Everything from mystery meat navigation (thank you Vincent) to links that don't look like links to any degree.

So when you say do I care about issues from the W3C.... when it could potentially cost a company like Target millions of dollars an impact the very core of how e-commerce sites are coded, you sure as heck bet I care. That aside, I care on a professional level because I care about the quality of code and markup I am delivering.. it's what separates the hobbyists from the craftsmen.

Todd Purgason:
Well being that most our work is advertising based and very visual/interactive we don’t really pay much attention to accessibility issues.

Sodaplay:
To my continued embarrassment the old Sodaplay dates back to some of the least accessible graphic design dogmas of the web in 2000 with tiny un-scalable text and an irrational aversion to upper case letters. These days we’re much more mindful about creating designs that work on all levels and so accessibility is an integral aspect of our process. W3C is a useful tool but no more.
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WeWorkForThem:
There are many reasons I use the sites that I do, information being the number one reason. Many sites do not treat information as something that should be organized and thought through. When we used to design sites, we often spent a day or more just on narrowing down sections, placing info into other areas, working on how the user will access the info, etc etc. The “KISS (keep it simple stupid)” is great, but you really need someone who can do that job and sometimes simple isn’t “thoughtful”. Another job of design is to present the organized information in a clean and functional manner. This is also another problem. You have these web standards people who know very little about design, yet they are experts in the subject because it is a new format? I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but many people solved many of these issues in the mid 1900’s and the rules apply to the web. Read grid systems, think about it for two seconds and you can easily see how it transforms over to the web. I often thought about writing a grid systems for the web, but I couldn’t be so arrogant.

So I may be missing out on a lot of things but I have this frustration with usability experts. It’s sometimes painful to use the net because of poor decisions with big sites. Even the back end (how the code is written) is a huge problem also. A slow or broken website is pretty much an unusable site.