by Damyon Wiese.
Agree that you shouldn't try and hide the text when it would benefit everyone - the user profile links are really a special case where showing the extra text is undesirable from an asthetic point of view.
But the real point of this discussion is when a situation does arise and you want to provide more information to screenreaders for a link - what is the best approach to providing that information. Currently I am seeing title tags used to provide this extra information which according to WCAG is 100% wrong. WCAG says accesshide is the way to go (reposting link: http://www.w3.org/TR/2012/NOTE-WCAG20-TECHS-20120103/C7).