Looks like they probably have nice food, too, Kyle.

I guess all I can do now is try to worm my way into the HTML5 cabal. Once I’ve done that, I’ll have to look around to find another one I can join in order to complete a set.

I’m a non-expert in this field, but it sounds to me like John is asking a pretty sensible question. Has Ian, Anne or anyone else on their half of this discussion actually had discussions with blind users to confirm their needs and web usage desires/preferences? If not, they need to brake hard on the egos and accept that some outside advice on this might be important.

For no reason at all, I installed the FireVox voice extension, and so it would belt out all kinds of words at me as I browsed.
Eventually, I decided it was annoying, verbose, long-winded, and almost unintelligable (though that last one was because it was Microsoft Sam), so I ended up disabling it.

I’d suggest that anyone working on accessibility options should spend a good chunk of time relying on those options. Try a screen reader out, and find out for yourselves how long is too long, and what kind of markup works best.
It really is hard to judge anything about it before trying it. If I’d been part of the team trying to put the spec together, I know I would have made some horrible errors.