it right it's something of an academic exercise. At present no screen readers support HTML5 document outlining properly, and given the glacial pace of accessibility software development, won't be doing any time soon. The latest version of JAWS is alone in offering partial support. One might think that a well marked up HTML5 document might facilitate its indexing by search engines, but, again, as Luke points out, HTML markup doesn't make any difference to real world search rankings: quality of in-bound links is infinitely more important. The hard truth that the HTML5 sectioning elements may well actually damage a page's accessibility is, for me, a quite devastating and decisive argument against their use. Luke notes one other accessibility concern: the new tags are not recognised by Internet Explorer versions 6 to 8. There's a popular polyfill, the HTML5 Shiv, but that still leaves IE 6, 7 and 8 users with JavaScript disabled high and dry. Luke writes: In 2010, Yahoo published the results of research they did into this very question -- how many visitors do have JavaScript disabled? It turns out that 2.06% of visitors hitting Yahoo's US websites (which includes significant non- US traffic) had JavaScript disabled, as did 1.29% in the UK, 1.46% in France, and 1.28% in Spain. (Brazil was an outlier with just 0.26%.). Now I personally don't think this is necessarily a showstopper - if the sectioning elements were indeed useful then I think in the interests of progress this is an issue we