I really enjoyed this article. As a Sport and Event Management minor, I learned extensively about universal design in terms of building facilities. The concept is applied the same to web design as it is to facility planning: what you are creating is for the user, not necessarily you, so it needs to be inclusive to all people.
I thought the author’s point about universal web design possibly hindering the designer’s creativity was rather silly. The entire website design is creative in and of itself. It is rather selfish for the web designer to not want to include accessible design functions because they think it doesn’t allow them to show their creativity. I don’t think accessibility should be given low priority – it should be come second nature. Using heading levels is already second nature to us – who have only been coding for 3 months – so professional web designers should find all accessible design techniques as second nature as well.