It was a combination of the absurd pricing for the third party apps and that the people most affected by this would be not only those with accessibility issues, but the mods who do damn near all the day-to-day operations of the site. Reddit relies on unpaid moderators to keep subs from turning into bot spamming grounds and the official app is more difficult to use for basic functions and doesn't support many of them at all.

So they were essentially giving the finger to their unpaid workforce and then claiming that the complainers were mad about no longer getting everything for free. It's a pretty hefty dose of hypocrisy.