For people who are interested in more details about Drupal 7 accessibility, I suggest that we should post an accessibility announcement in conjunction with the release of 7. I've suggested a sample below for discussion purposes. This is a wiki page, so feel free to edit. The group of accessibility contributors accomplished so much that it seems like cause for announcement, celebration, and looking ahead. -Brandon
Drupal 7 makes significant strides towards greater accessibility and modern accessibility best practices. Version 7 has over 75 accessibility improvements contributed by a volunteer team of dozens of accessibility supporters investing hundreds of hours.
Major improvements to Drupal 7 include the introduction of ARIA for auto-complete fields and progress indicators. Keyboard navigation is substantially approved in many areas. For example, keyboard navigation of Drupal 7's new "vertical tabs" layout ensures that the new interface for settings is universally accessible. Similarly, the interface for re-ordering menus and terms now provides an accessible alternative to the drag-n-drop default.
Hundreds of form fields now have proper labels, especially radios and checkboxes. Use of headings (h2) before navigation menus and site search are provided as well as "skip to main content" links to skip over repetitive navigation. Markup is improved for breadcrumbs, expand/collapse fieldsets, page navigation (pagers), local tasks and tabs.
The introduction of "off screen" CSS allows critical accessibility information to be located off-screen, when appropriate, replacing the inappropriate use of "display: none". For example, "read more" links now contain off screen text with the title of the link target.
At the theme layer, Drupal 7 ships with 3 new themes included: Bartik, Seven, and Stark. Color contrast and accessibility of these themes is greatly improved. Many of the older, less-accessible themes that were part of Drupal 6 no longer ship with 7.
Using Drupal 7 will allow you to build more accessible websites than with past versions of Drupal. Theme creators and developers of contributed Drupal add-on modules will find that version 7 provides more tools for creating accessible web experiences.
The push towards universal accessibility is far from over. The Drupal admin interface still has some fields without proper labels and fieldsets as well as other changes needed to meet WCAG 2.0 standards. Many of Drupal's popular themes and contributed modules have yet to take advantage of new accessibility features. Plans for Drupal core version 8 are also in the works, with hopes of greater accessibility benefits from ARIA and HTML5.
How can you get involved? If you find an accessibility problem with Drupal core or add-on modules and themes, report it in the Issue Queue (http://drupal.org/project/issues) or post it to the Drupal Accessibility Group (http://groups.drupal.org/accessibility). Learn more at the Drupal Accessibility Statement: http://drupal.org/about/accessibility .
What is Drupal? Drupal is the leading open source web content management system that powers websites large and small. Learn more about Drupal 7 at http://drupal.org/drupal-7.0 .