We have a historical site in the Netherlands, with a miniBB forum of course.
Lately some visualy handicapt people started participating with the forum.
Therefore in the templates I have tried to fill in all alternatives to the icons.
Now almost every ICON contains the text ALT="ICON". the blanco pictures now contain alt="#".

It would be nice to our guest with a visual handicap if the alternatives for the icons would contain a more appropiate text.

main_header.html
<img src="https://www.minibb.com/forums/img/logo.jpg" height="100" border=0 alt="sitelogo">

main_forums_cell.html
<img src="https://www.minibb.com/forums/img/forum_icons/{$forum_icon}" width=16 height=16 border=0 alt="{$forum_title}">

main_last_discuss_cell.html
<img src="https://www.minibb.com/forums/img/forum_icons/purple.gif" width=16 height=16 border=0 alt="ICON">

main_topics_cell.html
<img src="https://www.minibb.com/forums/img/topic_{$tpcIcon}.gif" width=16 height=16 alt="ICON">

<img src="https://www.minibb.com/forums/img/!pix.gif" width=150 height=1 alt="#">

Well, the thing you are telling about, is called "accessibility compliance". We were thinking a lot about it in the past, but suspended it for a while. Accessibility Compliance is a very difficult question, and according to W3C standarts, even "A" level (there are A, AA, AAA) is difficult to achieve.

miniBB has only HTML compliance. And it has no even A level. So if we decide to implement it, it will be much harder, than only to specify ALTs.

But probably, it's a good suggestion... and we could even implement this in the next release. At last what is depending on ALTs... thanks!

I wasn't asking for accessibility compliance, because I know how hard it is to accomplish.
Just making a reading of the icons ALT-tekst, makes the forum more accessible.

thanks...

As I've mentioned - we could implement this in the next release.

Hi Peter,

Assuming your visually handicapped visitors use screen readers (speech synthesizers) and braille displays, it will actually be a lot more useful for them if you left the alt-text empty like this: alt="" . When you do this, the screen reader / braille rule will simply skip over the picture and ignore its existence. This helps reduce confusion greatly. After all, the icons are only decorative and do not actually contribute to the forum's content.

Kind regards,
James

James - hm, good opinion!