Bob Easton's discovery that screenreaders will almost always skip content hidden to visual browsers via display: none, including skip navigation links, turns out to be not much of a problem thanks to techniques introduced by Jon Hicks and Tom Gilder. Problems arise. The community fixes 'em. Of course, this would be a nonissue if we'd all followed Joe Clark's advice:
You're not going to like this, but to make a lengthy list of links accessible, your "Skip navigation" link must be visible. It doesn't have to be intrusive, but it has to be apparent and self-explanatory in all browsers.
In comment spam news, earlier this month Simon Willison created a simple blacklist for blocking spammers, a technique that's previously been used to solve a similar problem, and that's now garnering some support. Other proposed solutions include distributed systems that look for identical comments across several sites (a logistical nightmare), and simple visual tests that can't be passed by automated systems (an accessibility nightmare). It's been almost a year since the last round of comment spam discussions. But we're all still waiting for things to get worse.