What he means is that if you are using a lot of accessor methods (methods to set or get protected properties) you probably have your methods in the wrong class. Keep the property and methods that use each other together in the same class library. Then you won't need to use accessor methods to access the protected properties, because they will be visible to the methods of the class.
..."overuse implies related things are not being kept together", implies bad design.

Don't confuse accessor methods with _access and _assign methods. They are quite different things.

Hope this helps.

>In Steven Black's article "Some Pitfalls of Inheritance" in the summer issue of Code on page 46, he makes the statement "Beware of overboard accessor methods, which are also known as SET_() and GET_() mthods, because their overuse implies that related things are not being kept together"
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>I don't understand what "accessor methods" are and why it their overuse is bad. Any ideas?