"Thinking about people directly" misses the benefit of an objective, well-defined third-party evaluation (i.e googlebot). If you think about "people" directly,

"Thinking about people directly" misses the benefit of an objective, well-defined third-party evaluation (i.e googlebot). If you think about "people" directly, I would imagine that those people, in your mind, all browse the web with your web browser, in your OS, with your abilities. These people all find content the same way you do. Of course, we both know that many people do not browse the web in IE8, just as many do not browse the web in Windows at all. A great number (but perhaps a tiny percentage) don't have flash. Having a nice objective measure of what makes a page accessible is a very useful thing for a web developer.