The blind are blind, not retarded. Sighted people infer the meaning of breadcrumbs from context and blind people can do the same. The ">" symbol didn't start out as being an international breadcrumb sign--it had a different meaning and was adapted to the metaphorically similar purpose of showing the relative size of subsections. There's nothing stopping blind people from making the same inference when they read "Home greater-than Articles greater-than Movie reviews".<p>If he thinks the blind can't figure out breadcrumbs, he'd probably spit his coffee if he saw one programming.
On a tangent: when parsing <title>s, does Google comprehend "page < section < site" the same as "site > section > page"? Up until now, I used the former, because it reads better in squished tabs and bookmarks better—but am I losing Google juice because of that?
This seems somewhat silly - isn't the most useful part of the whole "semantic web" that machines can process it easily? I do agree that Google's implementation is rather... ad-hoc.
Hm, a > b > c is supposed to be worse than a (image) b (image) c? I disagree. The style="breadcrumb" approach also sucks (overly verbose and complicated).