Like the summary, Bruce. As ever, you put it in a very readable and easy-to-understand way (dare I say it, you have an ‘accessible’ style?). In addition, any article that uses the phrase ‘pre-menstrual dalek’ has got to be good.

Anyone who has met you might not realise that you have a disability, but that just goes to show how many others are in the same boat, so to speak. It’s important to remind people of this.

Anyway, you focused on that one leg. Now I’d be interested to see one of the other legs of this ‘stool’ alongside it – that being the design leg. The examples of accessible sites that look like they’ve actually had an iota of designer input are few and far between (I’m not including the personal blogs here – they almost don’t count, in my opinion, preaching as they are to the converted – but rather I’m thinking of the bigger sites out there).

You know what though, I like Malarkey’s trifle analogy more than the stool one. Especially if I have to eat it

The Validator, which is always right and as merciless as a pre-menstrual dalek.

This is probably going slightly off-topic, but one weakness of markup validators is that they don’t safeguard against DOM injection. It’s becoming more and more popular to see techniques that add invalid elements and/or attributes using scripting, purely so they get a clean bill of health from markup validators. As the scripts always run when the page is loaded, it would be relatively straight forward for markup validators to include changes to the DOM made through scripting.

Of course, their biggest weakness is the point that you make; they have no idea of what is semantically correct for the content.

http://joeclark.org/dossiers/DRC-GB.html