It seems unlikely that the current GWT rendering of widgets could be made accessible
according to WAI guidelines due to the frequent use of tables for layout. However,
one area to investigate is providing alternate set of "accessible" implementations of
standard GWT widgets that render a WAI compatible representation of the UI tree. Then
either the user could opt to "switch to accessible mode" or perhaps some kind of
browser detection could be used for accessible user agents. The rendered GWT
application might look ugly if viewed by a regular user, but might be much more
usable by screen readers.

I think the goal should not be to make any GWT application automatically accessible,
but to enable developers to write accessible applications if they wish. Since this
can be done today with desktop GUI widget libraries like MFC and Swing, it can
probably be done with GWT with changes. But there's no way around the fact that it's
a lot of work. Robert Hanson lays out a workaround technique which is essentially to
write a WAI compliant page/app first, and then wrap it in GWT.

We would like to do more with accessibility in general; it is a very hard problem
with no perfect solutions. As we progress on tackling this problem, posts will be
added here.

Thanks for your comments -- I think you have triaged this issue appropriately. It is
worth noting that if you deal with the government or government contractors this can
often be the differentiator between one product and the next. I think the
requirements are only going to get more stringent. I think you guys should look at
what is going on with dojo to see what can be applied to GWT. I don't know all the
details, beyond that it looks like they are adding additional semantics to their tags
to allow screenreaders to know what to do with them -- something like "this <div> is
actually a tree node".

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Perhaps some accessibility features could be added to GWT in the nearer term. 
Firefox 1.5 and up supports certain screen readers by adding namespace-scoped
attributes to relevant nodes in a document.  See here for more details:
http://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/ARIA:_Accessible_Rich_Internet_Applications

I'm rescoping this issue slightly to deal specifically with the ARIA accessibility
standard. This is specifically designed for Ajax applications, and should work fine
with GWT. Plus Rajeev's already working on it :)

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1_5_RC has been released.