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Opera has been planning to use bink but had to wait to announce until google announced I presume. http://www.brucelawson.co.uk/2013/hello-blink/

Opera has said that they will also be moving to Blink as they transition away from the Presto engine.

The point of standards is to regulate competing implementations. It's widely understood that competing standards = BAD (and they exist far too often in far too many industries, to their detriment; also, see this mandatory XKCD reference http://xkcd.com/927/ ) and competing implementations = GOOD (the alternative is an IE6 situation, which we're fast moving towards again with WebKit).

Here's an interesting article on the amount of *postitive* support there was from web developers for IE6 when it first came about... which does give me a strange sense of deja vu, even if the author of that particular blog post wouldn't agree.

I wonder how much this has to do with the average age of web programmers. With a development-community with such a short-term memory, I wonder will the inability to learn from past disasters (like IE6) lead to endless recursion ...

Unfortunately, there's a lot of ignorance to fight. The average PHB assumes that creating a website that the blind can use is an arduous task, but this is not the case. If you build your website correctly the first time around, you essentially get accessibility for free.

If, on the other hand, your website was built by the average clueless Dreamweaver jockey, then you'll probably have to spend money retrofitting your website. But that's the clueless web developer's fault for doing it wrong in the first place. Sadly, it's in their best interests to tell the PHBs how hard it is, and the PHB's aren't qualified to know when they are being told a pack of lies.

It's only in unusual circumstances that accessibility is difficult when you include it as a requirement from the start of the project. However, typical managers go on what they've been told, and what they are told leads them to avoid accessibility unless they really need to address it. Lawsuits are a good way of getting them to address it.

Is the threat of legal action the only really effective way to get companies to create accessible (and thus standard-compliant) websites?"

Don't assume that accessibility and standards-compliance are the same thing. They are not. You can create accessible sites that don't conform to the specifications, and you can create inaccessible sites that do conform to the standards.

It's also worth pointing out that avoiding being sued isn't the sole reason to make your website accessible. It can often improve various semi-related features of your website, such as search engine rankings and usability. According to PAS 78, the accessibility guidelines published by the UK's Disability Rights Commission, Tesco and Legal & General got great returns on their investments into accessible websites.

There's more information about that last bit on Bruce Lawson's weblog. Highlight:

After a program of re-design using third party testers, they reduced their risk of legal action and found, as side-effects:

• A 30% increase in natural search-engine traffic
• "significant improvement" in Google rankings "for all target keywords"
• 75% reduction in time for page to load
• Browser-compatibility (not a single complaint since)
• Accessible to mobile devices
• Time to manage content "reduced from average of five days to 0.5 days per job"
• Savings of £200K annually on site maintenance
• 95% increase in visitors getting a life insurance quote
• 90% increase in Life insurance sales online
• 100% return on investment in less than 12 months.

Heard of Google? They managed to attract one or two users wihout any color scheme at all.

It's almost offtopic, but I can't resist mentioning Bruce Lawson's supremely ugly CSS skin, Geocities 1996. Unfortunately, Firefox is unable to manage the more epilepsy-inducing effects. Soo much for browser independence!