There are still outstanding accessibility issues with icon fonts. Until there is standards coverage for icon fonts, widespread browser support, and accessibility tool (like screen reader) awareness of those standards, I consider it a backward step for the web.
Very true, handling accessibility issues is a challenge when using icon fonts. In certain browsers, the ARIA specifications suggest you could do something like
<button aria-label="Close">X</button>
to deal with screen readers to an extent. There's also the (pretty much completely unsupported) ACSS property
{speak: none;}
in conjunction with
<aria-hidden="true">
and then describe the icon with an offscreen span, pretty much as described here: http://css-tricks.com/html-for-icon-font-usage/#jump-alone. Still not even close to a good solution, though. If you have any insight into better handling icon fonts, I'd love to know.
