I can't speak toward the other icon font resources the article mentioned, but IcoMoon did a great job taking SVG files and turning them into a font. The app supports custom character mapping and comes with a sample icon library.
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.
App: http://keyamoon.com/icomoon/#toHome
Sample library: https://github.com/Keyamoon/IcoMoon--limited-