c) Outsource the problem to Russia.

Answer: "You end up in a black hole due to division by zero."

Don't tidal forces eventually produce near-circular orbits? Thus, if they were captured asteroids, over time a "lopsided" orbit should grow circular and roughly equatorial.

Correction, I meant to say "bell-shaped" curve, not "bell curve". The second is a specific family of curves. (No Kardashian puns intended.)

Have God let me fork several versions of current Earth and I'll find the optimum min wage.

That's almost like saying, "If consuming water is good then drowning to death in it must be better". In short, improvements are generally on a bell curve: there's an optimum level of any given factor. Too much or too little tends to create problems.

TV's and home computers/tablets/smartphones will probably eventually merge/blur; it's fairly obvious that's what's in the longer-term cards. A TV will just be a "really big computer screen".

What's really needed are decent standards to help blur the distinction that the industry as a whole actually follow, not some grand new invention. But intellectual property protectiveness habits of the "old school" content providers seem to get in the way.

These kinds of things generally require domain-specific tuning and shaping, especially in terms of legacy systems and legacy content. But, if you can somehow concoct a slick tool that simplifies such issues, we may yet beat a path to your door.

We have special domain requirements that are difficult to do without JavaScript. Not impossible, but difficult. With enough time and/or money, it's all "solve-able", but as usual, nobody wants to pay for that much rework and will probe potential alternatives first.

I have to disagree. Text-only is really boring. It's like a bus with no windows. Even through the dumpy parts of town, windows are preferred by most humans to no windows. Similarly, cheap graphics are often better than no graphics, as long as they are not overly obnoxious.

Our tentative plan is to keep graphics small, sparse, and vague, but we have a lot of old junk to revamp and clip out images from.

detect when [ADA] software is in use?

There is no known standard. Each "reader" vendor may send hints via HTTP header variables, but there is no guarantee they will be the same on the next version.

Plus, mirroring all the "regular" content with an ADA version is a bear. Authors would have to be diligent to keep them in sync.

Maybe if we had a clean CMS it may be possible to simply generate the appropriate content format from a single set of content (data), similar to some mobile-friendly presentation techniques, but right now we have a hodge-podge and historical baggage. Plus, if authors don't use the editor it right, it can still be out of whack, such as "fake" indenting of outlines.

Is it possible to provide an accessibility specific phone number...

We considered that, but it would probably have to be staffed 24/7 to match the website's availability. In other words, if we offer 24/7 service to "regular" readers, we must do the same for the sight-impaired callers, otherwise they could claim discrimination. It's a big org such that no one help-desk person will know everything, meaning you'd have to pay specialists to sit at the phone desk at 3am every night.

All known solutions require lots of resources we don't readily have. Management keeps pressing for an easy way out and easy, cheap answers, but I cannot give any.

Excellent questions, though.

The universe is a hall of mirrors.

Management doesn't want to give up certain functionality. They want SOLID PROOF we must cater to the Lowest Common Denominator to not get sued more. I have none. I have no statistics on sue probabilities to give them. (This includes out of court settlements, not just court cases.)

Further, ease-of-reading is a matter of degree. Some pages if you look at raw HTML are readable verbally, but just not very "friendly". They are not outright "wrong", just not "smooth" to read that way. Such difficulty level is a continuum.

And what exactly is the lowest-common-denominator? If a brand of reader has a bug, is that the lowest?

"Regular" people usually don't know the difference, in my experience. Web designers pay more attention to the source of such images than most readers because it's their job. Maybe if your org is Gucci or BMW it matters more because such customers hone into style issues more. Either way, my org doesn't want to pay for "boosted" styling even if it were the "right" choice, marketing-wise. Not my call. They want cheap, I give them cheap. (It's mostly a side topic to ADA anyhow.)

Correction: rude tone of response, not of "request".