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The biggest accessibility problem I have with LaTeX for bookwriting is that the stylesheet language is very strange by modern standards. You can ignore it if you're writing academic papers with a provided stylesheet (or with one of the default ones), but you often will want to do some custom formatting if you're writing a book. I've heard ConTeXt might be an improvement, though.

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Context is better for book type content, if you want to do things like sidebars, colors, etc. It's also a little more "do what I say" vs LaTeX's "do what you think is best", which generally produces good results, but can be infuriating when e.g. you really want a figure and certain text on the same page or something like that.

You have a good point there. The problem is that LaTeX doesn't have a fundamental distinction between 'style' and 'commands'. Everything is really just a command, but by convention some of them are wrappers around predefined styles, like \section and \chapter for example. If you want to change the style of these yourself then you have to dive into the internals of LaTeX where things get messy.

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