And anyway, a lot more people would regularly and happily use screen readers if it weren't for all those badly and lazily designed web sites and user interfaces that use modal dialogs and don't bother supporting accessibility, which make them much less useful and accessible for everyone.
Speaking of context: Even if screen readers or people with disabilities did not exist, there are still many important legitimate reasons not to use modal dialogs, and still many perfectly reasonable alternatives, so your bogus statistical argument for using modal dialogs is still dubious and doesn't address any of those other issues.
https://ddiy.co/web-accessibility-statistics
>Here are the numbers regarding how many people have disabilities that make accessibility features necessary when surfing the internet.
>4.9% of U.S. adults have a vision disability with blindness or serious difficulty seeing even when wearing glasses, requiring screen readers.
>5.7% of U.S. adults are deaf or have serious difficulty hearing.
>10.8% of people with a disability have a cognition disability with serious difficulty concentrating, remembering, or making decisions.
>There are an estimated 300 million people in the world with color vision deficiency which requires color-adjusting tools on sites.
>About 16% of people who use screen readers have multiple disabilities.
>Roughly a quarter of Americans with disabilities (26%) say they have high-speed internet at home, a smartphone, a desktop or laptop computer, and a tablet compared with 44% of those who report not having a disability.
>18% of US adults report that they have a disability, according to this survey, which asked respondents if any “disability, handicap, or chronic disease keeps you from participating fully in work, school, housework, or other activities.”
>Americans with disabilities are three times as likely as those without a disability to say they never go online (15% vs. 5%.)
>By 2050 nearly 2.5 billion people are projected to have some degree of hearing loss and at least 700 million will require hearing rehabilitation.
>By 2060 the number of people 65 or older is expected to double to 98 million.
Another point is that screen readers aren't only useful for blind people. Here's a demo of a screen reader that I implemented for reading the long but amusing catalog object descriptions in The Sims ("Simplifier" demo starts at 3:15), that's useful for kids who aren't good at reading yet (but want to learn while playing a game), and anyone who is too impatient to read all the tiny text on the screen:
Demo of The Sims Transmogrifier, RugOMatic, ShowNTell, Simplifier and Slice City:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Imu1v3GecB8
Also check out the "talking pie menus" and tool palette in X11 SimCity (aka open source Micropolis):
X11 SimCity Demo:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jvi98wVUmQA
OLPC SimCity Demo:
