I agree. I don't dislike them.

But I don't think a page will necessarily be better by adding them. It's a matter of judgement and design balance: everything you add to a page affects the balance of attention. A page is not necessarily better by adding more stuff.

Let's take it a step further. I have access keys and skip links on my site, but the skip links are invisible (they appear on focus, if you press tab) and the access keys can only be found if the user goes to the help page.

The most effective way to guarantee users can find these features is to make them visible on every page -- and ideally give them a heavy visual and structural weighting (such as stuffing them in an <h2>).

By doing that, however, I would also lose something: I would complicate my design. There would be more stuff to look at, so users would be slightly delayed in scanning the page and finding what they want. The more heavily I emphasise these accessibility items, the more likely users are to find them and use them -- but also the more distracting they are from my main content.

So it's a matter of balance and judgement. Personally I prefer accessibility to be done more in the background, rather than shove it in the user's face. Users have their own ways of doing things, and my main aim with accessibility is not to allow my design to interfere with their familiar methods. That's why I think you must be very careful with access keys, for example.

Users spend most of their time on other websites, not yours. Accessibility widgets look nice to the designers, but I'm sceptical of their usefulness. Where the browser itself offers a feature, such as text-resizing, I prefer not to clutter my page with a custom widget that replicates it.

Again, I'm not saying that such things are bad or incorrect. I'm just saying that it's a matter of balance and judgement. Some designers will give a higher weight to "in your face" accessibility; others will prefer to avoid cluttering the page.