To start, I'm a believer in an accessible web. Visually impaired folks need to access the web too.

However, after reading that article I'm not convinced you shouldn't use title attributes. Honestly it kind of sounds like the screen readers are the ones shooting people in the foot. Why not activate reading title tags by default? Additionally, I feel like people are insinuating that using a title attribute is discriminatory against those who are impaired. That's simply not true. Use both! One of my favorite parts of the xkcd.com comics is the tooltip when you hover over the comic. Forcing that text into an invisible span tag would ruin the comic for me and everyone else who doesn't need a screen reader.

Rather than resort to hacky span tags and css,why don't screen readers make a simple switch to reading it?