I am blogging on the Joomla! Community Site about the preparations I'm making prior to starting the coding of an accessible template for the backend. It turns out that there is some MVC coding work still to be done so I'll need to add some of that to my project schedule.
For the past 5 years Google has sponsored a summer of code where students work on various open source projects. This summer I'll be creating accessible administrator templates for Joomla's backend.
Joomlaworks & YOOtheme have both come out with CCK extensions. I've been experimenting with Joomlaworks K2 beta version and this blog, written with K2, is the result.