Thanks for a nice writeup of this -- I know all of it, since I've done software accessibility work, but I couldn't have said it nearly so concisely and eloquently.

I'd also add that if you want to use tables for formatting, there's some easy ways to make sure they look and sound good with the formatting gone -- I do have some tables on RP journal userinfo pages because it's just What Everyone Does. But I pull them up in the Lynx browser (which is text-only) and make sure that everything is in order and comprehensible. No, they're not ideal, but we can't use CSS in userinfo pages, so making the tables non-sucky is a compromise.