Bumped into the exact same problem, developing a custom CMS for another developer who isn't likely to need a screen reader anytime soon.
Thanks mihaisimi for your pointer. With a bit of digging into CKEditor instance properties, I ended up writing the JS bit below to remove the "Rich text editor, element_id" title from the content area.
CKEDITOR.on("instanceReady", function(e) {
var $frame = $(e.editor.container.$).find(".cke_wysiwyg_div");
if($frame) $frame.attr("title", "");
});
So basically as soon as the CKEditor loads I'm wrapping the CKEditor's container in a jQuery object, I look for the actual content div
with .find() and remove its title with .attr().
Please note this solution requires jQuery. I'm using CKEditor version 4.1.1 in 'div mode'. Anyone using a similar version in 'iframe mode' would probably get away with changing .find(".cke_wysiwyg_div")
to .find(".cke_wysiwyg_frame")
.
You could append the bit of code to the ckeditor/config.js file, for example. Its not pretty, but it works.
Hope my solution helps anyone bumping into this problem.