Accessibility with Fangs and display:none

I've been busy at work over the last few weeks with the re-design of the company website. The site is standards compliant, I've been fixing the markup to be semantically correct and replacing inline images with CSS backgrounds at appropriate places. One thing I'd been doing which I'd been blithely assuming would aid accessibility is hiding a link to the main content, skipping over the navigation section, near the top of the page. Today I installed the Fangs extension and found out that the 'skip to content' link doesn't show up. There's even an FAQ:

A lot of "accessibility" features of web standards such as Xhtml are not implemented in most screen readers. For example, JAWS makes no use of aural css features whatsoever. It also skips everything that has a CSS style of display:none.

I had a quick think about this and decided to steal a technique from the Suckerfish Dropdown menu (which are also used on the site), instead of setting the element to display:none I absolutely positioned it and then set it to left: -999em. Et voila - it still doesn't appear on screen, but it does now show up in the Fangs rendering of the page. Mind you, the rest of the page still needs some work - top of my list for removal from all future designs are pipes (the | character), because seeing 'vertical bar' repeated endlessly where it's just a separator and has no semantic value makes me think it would quickly become tiresome for screen reader users (first stop, the title attribute on this site's home page...).

Of course, after I'd worked all this out I discovered this solution is actually linked to from the Fangs FAQ, not that the link text really gives it away :)