Re: A Big Idea
Good to know I have company. I started on a "508 theme" right after posting, and quickly discovered that none of the bundled themes even validate as W3C-compliant CSS. Instead, I took the blank stylesheet (which also didn't validate, but was much easier to fix), installed that on my local test Tiki, and started hacking away at it. As we all know, the Tiki stylesheet is an absolute beast, so I don't expect to finish this project right away. This is strictly a volunteer job for me.
This experience makes me think that bringing all of the bundled themes into full 508/WAI (or even just basic W3C) compliance would be a nightmare. Since posting my first message, I've found some old entries in the Wiki that reveal that others have tilted at this windmill before. There was one suggestion that the 1.10 development branch would include only 508-compliant themes, but when I checked a snapshot of 1.10, I saw that isn't happening yet.
So here's my problem: right now, I run a community site using a combination of MediaWiki, Phpbb, and Serendipity. I did that after experimenting with Tiki on my own site (the DogFood principle) and seeing how hard it would be to fix this issue. I really want the unified site design we'd get with Tiki, but we have to make a good-faith effort to be compliant, so MediaWiki et al. won out. Those three apps aren't perfect, but they're much closer than Tiki at the moment.
Given what you've said above about your redesign, it appears that my Tiki is going to need some fixes that go deeper than the CSS. Is an accessibility overhaul really coming in a future release, or should I just jump ship now and head for Plone?