There are some minor bugs in gconf-editor that make it unusable by the blind, who use the Orca screen reader to run the program.  In particular, gconf values are mostly not communicated.  This is typically caused when programs fill in cell data during a callback function during cell rendering, rather than putting the data in the treeview model.  On a quick inspection of the code, it seems that values are being set during the cell_renderer_get_size callback, and are not included in the treeview model at all.

This would be a great program to get working properly with screen readers, because it showcases one of the most difficult cases - having a treeview column with a wide variety of data in the cells.  Also, it's just bad form for core applications like this directly from the Gnome team to be inaccessible.  It sets a bad precedent.

The easiest solution is to upgrade the treeview models used in gnome-editor and to stop setting cell renderer properties just prior to rendering a cell.  In general, this is the gnome-blessed solution.  I'll suggest a more general solution: changes to cells that are made during rendering could be made accessible to screen readers.  This could potentially solve a lot of accessibility bugs in a lot of applications.  The way I see such an enhancement working is that the cell renderers could detect when the properties that have been set on them are different from what would normally be computed from the treeview model.  In such cases, we could record these values in a hash table, and these recorded values could override the data that would normally be returned by accessible callbacks in the gail module.