@sam Thanks! Yes, I’ll break out the document to particular issues, treating this as the master issue and linking back to here. I’ll also just note some immediate answers to your questions here, but then move this over to those separate issues.
re: “ESC” key for popup - this is about some of the helpful tutorial kinds of popups. It may be difficult to re-create with my user in meta.discourse.org (this was most visible for us for first-time users as soon as they enter a new instance), but I’ll see what I can figure out to make this more specific.
re: color contrast, sure I’ll post some screenshots there. Also, while there’s some small compromise between the aesthetics of the experience and making it accessible, this is quite minimal. I’m excited to talk this out with you! More concretely, in regards to:
Do we really need to touch that? That text is merely an embellishment, giving it great contrast risks people not being able to tell they can enter stuff in the text area.
Yes, the point of this work is that different users experience these features differently. 
That’s where tools can help us with checking that when evaluating the tradeoffs between “how much contrast” when tuning RGBs
Finally, the issue @tapper82 has described is a great explanation of “#31. Needs to be a way to browse among messages quickly” in the audit doc, so I’ll link that and spin it out as a separate issue. @tapper82 and @jomaxro I’ll mention you over there too so you can track any other progress and we can all figure this out!
Thanks all! Making separate issues now.