Thanks for the feedback! We know we’re not there yet with accessibility and have been working on it more lately. At the end of 2020 we had a third-party accessibility audit done for the most important non-admin pages of Discourse and have started working through the high-priority issues over the past couple of weeks.
Now that you mention it, I can understand why finding the admin menu would be difficult. The link for the menu sits within one of the primary header menus… the aria-label is “go to another topic list or category”… which definitely doesn’t make it clear there are a couple admin links within.
Regarding the message that says Discourse remembers where you left off… the expected behavior is that when you enter the topic, you skip to where you left off reading. I just tried to navigate this with the keyboard and can confirm that it’s not putting focus in the correct place.
Many of our dropdowns are a custom implementation, and that’s one of the areas that have been pointed out to us for accessibility improvement. We’re also aware of the fact that our modals don’t trap focus, which leads to difficult-to-reach content, particularly on pages with infinite scrolling as you experienced.
Regarding your questions about sticking with Discourse… everything you listed is possible; it would amount to a few lines of CSS to hide those elements. That CSS would have to be in a theme, but it could exist within a theme component, which can be added on to any existing theme (so you wouldn’t have to change your primary theme). Themes are much better for the upgrade process, as they exist on top of Discourse… editing templates or forking as you mentioned makes updating very difficult.
We tag reports of accessibility issues here on Meta with an #accessibility tag so they’re easier to find in one place… but that said, the third-party accessibility report and subsequent work I mentioned earlier aren’t being tracked publicly.
Really appreciate the feedback here, especially considering that it took additional effort to post it. I hope over the course of the next few months Discourse becomes much easier for you to use.