Hi Webnauts, I assume you were talking to me?
Oh, I didn't mean to imply it was a perfect implementation, just that I found it unlikely that the intention was search engine spamming. I believe that this instance of the technique looks like it was intended to increase the accessibility of the page, not to spam the search engines.
Because all these things need to be judged on a case by case basis, you can't apply a blanket rule - sometimes this is done ethically to increase accessibility, sometimes it is used to spam search engines. Sometimes the intention is one, but a low skill levelonly manages to come up with the other

Heck, I just googled for image replacement accessiblity and got a whole bunch of results discussing this.
The state of the industry is that quite a few of the image replacement techniques aren't accessible at all! But that doesn't mean we don't keep trying

The post itself wasn't.
The majority of the responses were *shock gasp but, but I am using a very similar technique to make my page more accessible! Matt! Tell me you won't penalise me for that!!!'
The comment I pointed to was from Matt himself clarifying this.
If that isn't on topic then I have misunderstood the entire point of this thread, and I apologise.

From Danny's comment, I would guess that he isn't that up to date with accessibility.
Web design is a big field and he has specialised in the SEO end