There is No lack of information about Better Design/Coding Practices.
If people actually bothered to learn what they were doing – rather than being reliant on Dreamweaver and Photoshop – we wouldn’t have so many sucky sites!

Worse – you do Not know who to trust.
Jsut go look at the Guild of Accessible Web Designers (GAWD) – and resize your text!
Possible one of the Most Common requirements of users is to be able to adjust the text size – and so many sites literally break (I know – bad pun too).

There’s no excuse people.
The information is out there.
It’s jsut down to plain ignorance and laziness that you don’t already have the answers.
It also goes to show that you are Not testing your stuff out!

Go look at things like CSS Gardens etc.
Look at how many of those “beautiful” designs actually suck when it comes to being functional!

.

So – here’s the general idea.
Build it plain.
Make sure it works.

Make sure that it works with the keyboard and gives responses in the same ways as it does for Mouse.
Yes, that means you should be using :focus and :active (cover ie6) as well as :hover.

Make sure you can resize text.
Do Not make things of fixed height – and if you do – set overflow on it!
If you want set measuerment – use EMs, and set heights in EMs – then things scale.

Check the colours you are using – make sure there is Contrast!
MAke sure there is contrast before you start slappign in image backgrounds … and after the images are in – make sure there is still contrast!

Stuff like that is written All Over the Net!
Seriously – try Googling for it!

.

The distinction between Usability/Acessibility can be a little slim at times.
Increasing the response zone of a link with padding … is both A and U.
Making sure that labels/inputs respond visually … is both A and U.

Lets face it – if you improve the Accessibiltiy of the site (or at least bring it up to the bsics it should be at), you are improving the Usability of the site for that user-group, yes?

.

Okay – lecture over.
Sorry
;)

So what is your article really about? Since you offer tips about accessibility and usability and do not distinguish between the two, you leave people just as confused as when they arrived here. You’ve caused more problems than you attempted to solve.

And why didn’t you follow your own advice about alt tags on images? I don’t think many people would consider “screenshot” to be a helpful alternative to seeing the actual picture.

But on the last point (Complicated Drop Down Menus), I would say that in some applications (ie: ecommerce) they increase usability as they reduce the time it takes to reach a subcategory.