My initial take on it (and take it with a grain of salt, I am not a LaTeX power user, I just wrote my thesis in it and a few documents and haven't spent much time thinking about shorthand but,) is that there are basically two types of users who write LaTeX: people who author complicated documents and typeset equations and need LaTeX as their bread and butter of publishing and casual users who just want to write an essay or two.
Sounds like you're targeting much more of the latter group to increase accessibility. However, for that group of people a few LaTeX IDEs already exist that make it even easier than typesetting with a simpler mark up.
A lot of very smart people have spent a lot of time thinking about (La)TeX formatting, syntax and interaction and I doubt giving it a simplistic interface will do it much justice or introduce it to someone who found the original markup inaccessible.
Sounds like you're targeting much more of the latter group to increase accessibility. However, for that group of people a few LaTeX IDEs already exist that make it even easier than typesetting with a simpler mark up.
A lot of very smart people have spent a lot of time thinking about (La)TeX formatting, syntax and interaction and I doubt giving it a simplistic interface will do it much justice or introduce it to someone who found the original markup inaccessible.
Just my $0.02.