This is a good thread.

I just spent an hour and a half on the phone with some of the WAI
working group wrestling inconclusively with much the same rat's
nest of problems.

The example that Daniel was locked up on is the "no two links on
one line" rule because this is a problem for people using Lynx
and a DOS screenreader, but not for people using pwWebSpeak.

I think that some of the reasons that he didn't come away with a
simple answer is that different browser choices argue for
different page construction choices, and the players in both
those camps are competing amongst themselves.

The W3C hope for pages that can be presented multiple ways is the
Cascading Style Sheets idea.  Maybe one way we can work this is
to turn on the articulation of link presence (roughly
approximating the [LINK] interpolation in Lynx and pwWebSpeak) by
a user preference that invokes a style.

On Lynx-dev a while back while discussion how to represent images
for which the page author has not provided a fluent ALT text, a
good point was made by one site author that he uses ALT=""
carefully to hide the presence of images that can be skipped
without breaking the message.  Dragging the audio user through
all of these is not necessarily a service.

--
Al Gilman