For example, with companies that rant against ALT attributes on IMG tags and then incorrectly refer to them as ALT tags. Well, incompetence is their concept:

Just exactly what text can a person read or see in a 1 x 1 pixel gif? Zippo. Thus, the text or line reader, JAWS, cynthia, etc, should be smart enough to see that the image size of Height="1" and Width="1" and automatically know it's a spacer and then make a if-then condition to NOT PRONOUNCE alt tag in the spacer.gif.

I have edited quite a few table layouts myself - among other things because they were simply there - and I can't remember when the spacers were actually output in 1x1 pixels. Of course, the image itself was only 1x1 pixels in size, but the width and height attributes on the IMG tags were naturally according to the size that was to be spanned. In addition, there were a lot of other layout elements in the source that were candidates for ALT="" - for good reason, layout graphics should be correctly bypassed by screen readers. But according to their idea, the screen reader should first load the graphic element, which is completely useless for it, and look at how big it is. Just because the trolls are too lazy to write ALT="" on IMG tags.

Oh, and they also demand more intelligence from screen readers:

HERE IS SIMPLE SOLUTION so EVERYONE WILL NOT HAVE TO RE-WRITE THEIR PAGES just for you.

READ THE BIG TEXT FIRST, either font tags with say 3 to 7, or CSS styles with the biggest fonts sizes. Next, read the 2nd largest fonts second, and so on. This is JUST LIKE WHAT HUMAN WOULD DO ANYWAY.....So, look for Font tags with a setting 7 or 6 or 5 or 4 and down and in that order and then start reading it. Same with CSS, PIXELS sizes of say 24px should be read FIRST, NOT LAST!! How hard can this be? This what the browsers do anyway, so why can't you do it?

Exactly. The screen readers should just figure out what they need from the tag soup (including analyzing font tags and such junk), instead of the designer thinking about what he produces and providing a somewhat logical structure for text-only browsers. Hey, what are the h-tags and their friends for since HTML 1? Oh well, it's probably all just imagination ...

But you can find even more gems there, such as the discussion about CSS vs. Table Layouts, where CSS is of course made to look really bad. Because they just don't understand what CSS is all about and why you separate HTML and CSS and what's the good idea about it. Because they probably haven't had a single good idea in their entire sad designer life and therefore wouldn't even recognize a good idea if it hit them on the head with a big stick.

Oh yes, a word of warning to more current designers at the end: don't look at their source code, because it will give you hair loss, curled toenails, and rotten teeth.