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I somehow think that a search for "Adobe", "Photoshop", etc. will still give you adobe.com as the #1 result, despite its accessibility problems.

Pretty? Please, his site is ugly. I'm a webdesigner and i can tell you that if i'd deliver such a product to pretty much any customer, they'd slap me back to my office. I think all those pro-WAI critics need a reality check. True, a website such as his will probably never have any compatiblity issues with any current, past or future browsers. But it's just plain ugly. They need to realize that you can make a pretty websites (even with a thing they call images!) AND still be compatible for all computer browsers and platforms, you don't need to lower the eye pleasure to raise respect. How often have you heard "Oh, that site is pretty damn nice" compared to "Oh, that site is sooo compatible with Lynx!"?

• Invalid document encoding
• CSS errors
• Accessibility Failure

But as long as their branding is good, because thats what matters, not that they are violating the UK's Disability Discrimination Act which applies to web sites. Overall I see no evidence these people are competent to mirror software, I do however look forward to enjoying their 'branding'.

The point is NOT to make a web site accessible to people who don't understand web sites! This is like the icon caption: "AOL 4.0: DOUBLE CLICK TO START". Don't do that. It's okay to say "Click here to view the page I have written about foo." instead of "I have written a page about foo.", but please don't take all that advice literally.

Yes, please do not take this advice literally, as it is wrong. The poster is correct that you are not to build a web site to people that don't understand web sites, but W3C actually recommends the exact opposite of his example of what is ok.

Also, making multiple links only seperated by spaces is bad. Not just because slashdot's filter (or whatever it is that adds the link domain) probably just garbled that, but those with poor sight cannot tell the difference when one link ends and the other begins (unless slashdot garbles it for them to point out a link is done and where it goes).

Also, if you come across sites referencing Bobby, please note that for some reason Bobby has decided that if an image is used anywhere in the page it will not pass their test. Previously, they would mark it off and warn testers that they must ensure that colors aren't used to differentiate context. Because of this, there are many sites out there that will claim Bobby compliance when they are not. That said, Cynthia Says provides a similar tester with a few more options. If you use Mozilla, Chris Pederick's Web Developer Extension contains an option under the Validation menu to validate against WAI Accessibility or Section 508 (as well as validate links, HTML and CSS).

Finally, it's worth noting that some you should check your pages in Lynx Viewer to see how the page would look in Lynx (or just run Lynx yourself). This is useful for when judging your content based on its textual equivalent (which in some instances is what is read off by screen readers). Also add a "skip to content" link whose CSS sets it to display none for graphical browsers (some people suggest leaving this on, but W3C's validator even uses this method so I go with them). If they are having the screen read to them after a while they will no how the navigation system works, and won't need to have all those links read to them and just want to get to the actual content in your page. If you go the full XHTML route, you'll also have accesskeys and tabindexes available so they can tab through your links corretly and can get back to the beginning of your page if you set a named anchor as the first thing they tab to (the second being the skip to content, thus they can simply hit the 'T' key on to take them to the top and then skip the content to get to the beginning of the content OR they can go through the navigation (of course, you could have given each entry in your navigation an accesskey, but that's not always helpful, and this is useful in case they forget what they key is for something in the navigation).

Wow, I can't believe I knew this much on the subject....

Some Bobby alternatives: Cynthia Says and WAVE. There's also a Colorblind web page filter. For mozilla users, there's the Checky plug-in to manage validation services.