Working on Drupal Core accessibility

A lot of time and effort went into improving the accessibility of Drupal 7. We all deserve a round of applause for the work we did, we truly have a product to be proud of.

Our work is not complete.

Work on Drupal Core accessibility has slowed to a trickle, or perhaps an occasional drop (pun intended). We need to begin to rally the troops to pick up from where we left off at the end of the Drupal 7 development cycle, so that Drupal 8 can be an extremely accessible CMS out-of-the-box, one that would make ponies, kittens, and unicorns smile!

To this end please see below a dump of open accessibility issues in Core. If you'd like to fix these over the next few days / weeks then that would be great. However, if you, like me, do not have time to fix these all on your own, then let's start a discussion about how we can break these down into reasonable chunks of related issues (by topic or concept), and about how we can attract other developers, themers, designers, etc. to assist with the task.

Open Drupal 8 accessibility issues (2011-09-25)

Improve tabledrag accessibility for screen-reader users with WAI-ARIA - closed (won't fix)
Improve Overlay accessibility for ARIA compliant user agents - postponed
Book Module Navigation links need better context for accessibility - closed (fixed)
WCAG violation: Relying on a color by itself to indicate a field validation error - duplicate of Inline form errors for accessibility and UX
Require #title for all form elements - needs work
Research and implement accessible / reusable modal dialog -jQuery UI 1.10.0 released
http://jqueryui.com/changelog/1.10.0/
Provide accessible labels (was "Use fieldset and legend") for compound form elements - needs review
unpublished" status of rendered entities is not accessible"> - needs review
Allow forms to set custom validation error messages on required fields - needs review
Custom logo requires custom alt attribute in core themes - needs work
Add color options for foreground text where background colors can be altered - needs work
Add WAI-ARIA roles to Core blocks - Regression - needs review
Use aria-describedby to link form elements with form element descriptions - Committed
Allow #title_display = 'attribute' to be used with all native form fields - Active no patch
Tableselect: "select all rows in this table" header checkbox causing accessibility problems - needs review
Highlight vertical tabs when they have elements with errors - needs review
Filtered description shouldn't use a label when not associated with a form - Committed
Adds #title and #title_display to the weight columns of all tabledrag elements in core - fixed
New methods, standards for describing core themes on themes admin page (was Theme screenshots do not have adequate alt text...) - needs review
No semantics for nested comments / bad for screen-readers - Committed (follow-up performance issues)
Fix toolbar height with CSS and make text zoom usable - Fixed
When selecting a new formatter or editing settings focus context is lost - Can't reproduce
links wrapped in .contextual-links-wrapper divs are not accessible at all via keyboard alone also problems with screen readers - Committed
Make tabledrag warning message show when row weights are enabled, and add WAI-ARIA live region - Committed but with follow-up Issue.