"So few if any"? You must be forgetting about all the people who do useful stuff like filing bug reports, writing howtos, lending a hand on forums where the software gets talked about, writing and sharing scripts, plugins, modules, and other forms of add-ons, donating cash towards a particular application or documentation project, and hell, even in some cases *gasp* coding applications. Yeah, I know, it's easier to pretend that not one single person actually puts any effort towards anything and that everyone's just a freeloading ingrate unwittingly applauding their own destruction as they vaccuously wave their FOSS pennant and take the willingly-offered fruits of other people's labors, but no matter how many times this gets pitched, the end-times trumpets don't sound.

People keep making stuff and giving it to other people on the terms they decide, because that's how they want to do it. If you want to write and application and charge for X, Y, and Z around it, nobody's stopping you.

Aw heck - you're just looking for a spot to go all sour grapes contrarian on us. If project management on up isn't sharp or otherwise attentive enough to have already clamped down on unauthorized projects for every perceived IP and budgetary nightmare in the bogeyman's sack, they're not about to catch it when it's time to trim overhead in a blind panic. A shitcanning during an economic downturn is more likely to be a good ol' fashion lay-off that takes out Secret Agent FOSS in the same fell stroke as Corporate Drone.

I am hearing impaired. What's the accessibility standard to help me enjoy a podcast? Do we require closed captioning for all podcasts? Require a written transcript to be posted with every podcast?

No, we have guidelines which suggest providing a text alternative enclosed in a semantically meaningful, standards-compliant markup so anyone browsing with a user agent which deals with things in those terms can make some amount of use of them. In terms of audio content, this can range from full transcripts to a terse single sentence description of the subject of the audio content presented. It's up to the content provider to determine how far it needs to go, or if it's actually necessary considering the target audience; if they leave out people with hearing-related disabilities and are providing podcasts, and it hurts their profits/popularity/whatever, it's their gonads in the vice. Nobody is in fact required to do anything, so steer clear of ye olde fashioned "nanny state" reef before the young and/or impressionable lump it in with reflexive pseudo-libertarian diatribe computery types supposedly all embrace.

Seriously, if there's *anything* to complain about here, it's that the sprawling mess of WCAG 2.0 doesn't stress the practical approach of "consider the message before the medium". That's a very basic principle that every entity hoping for some amount of netly attention needs to consider: is what you're attempting to do suited towards [media type here], or is your message going to leave people out because you're fixating on a podcast/user-submitted video site/Flash game/whatever and the afterthought-like provisions to provide a more limited experience for the differently abled is short-changing those in the target audience? The point to remember here is that most of the solutions suggested are concessions towards smaller segments of a given audience and still provide a limited experience. If that seems like more trouble than it's worth, there are either people who just aren't in your audience that you most likely don't need to account for, or your whole concept of presentation for the subject matter is fucked.