It has been conjectured that the stably ergodic diffeomorphisms are open an
d dense in the space of volume-preserving, partially hyperbolic diffeomorph
isms of a compact manifold. In this paper we deal with two recalcitrant exa
mples, the standard map cross Anosov and the ergodic automorphisms of the 4
-torus. In both cases we show that they may be approximated by stably ergod
ic diffeomorphisms which have the stable accessibility property.