punBB acessibility

Moved to PunBB Discussion
Paul would be able to say more, but yes, PunBB is very accessible

Yup, PunBB is one of the most, if not the most, accessible. He might not be perfect (no software or website is), but knowing your userbase impairments you could easily adjust it for them. Its base is very neat and clean.

PunBB 1.2, the current version, is probably one of the most accessible forums you'll find. It's far from perfect though. In PunBB 1.3, we've spent a lot of time and effort on improving the accessibility. We've had people from The Guild of Accessible Web Designers help us with testing as well as real-world testing from people with visual impairments (using screen readers). I'm convinced PunBB 1.3 will be the most accessible forum out there.

PunBB 1.3 is aiming meet all relevant WCAG "AA" checkpoints.  Improvements of particular interest
- All forms, including the admin interface use standards compliant markup and properly associate labels with with inputs
- All forms are naturally source ordered so tabindex is no longer used and are generally simplified
- Skip navigation links as standard
- Better table markup to make tables easier for screen reader users
- Correct use of active/focus on links to make it easier for keyboard navigators
- Link text improved to avoid links with the same text pointing to different locations e.g. where the menu for a post says "Quote" part of the link is hidden using the accessible "off left" technique. What screen reader users actually hear is "Quote post 6", "Quote post 7" etc.
- Ability to use alt attribute for posted images
- Better, more semantic, markup for post content. In particular, use of paragraphs instead of multiple line breaks.
- There will be some additional stylesheets in the default installation for the visually impaired e.g. large text, high contrast.

Of course, that doesn't help you immediatelly but you can be sure that if you use PunBB 1.2 it will be at least as accessible as any of the alternatives and it will be a painless upgrade to 1.3 which should be a lot better than most of the alternatives.

If in the mean time any of your visually impaired users would like to do some testing on version 1.3 please email me. The more feedback the better. Making something technically accessible is the easy part, making it a pleasure to use for somebody with special requirements is rather more difficult and does need some end user input.

You can have "public" and "private" forums. If you create a new user group, and call it, say "approved_users". Then you set-up the approved_users group with permissions to view and post to all your private forums, and the regular "user" or "guest" groups with no view permissions. New users would not be able to view any forums, but once you move them to the approved_users group they can.

Rich: I will get in touch with you once I have my test board re-established.

Good point about the voice commands, I hadn't thought about that one. Fortunately, its only one line of css and all the hidden items are in one block so its easy enough to make stuff visible. This unfortunately is one of those cases where trying to help one set of users is detrimental to another.

Image verification isn't standard on PunBB; it's a mod.

http://www.punres.org/desc.php?pid=250

Even though I don't have any accessibility issues, I'd love to have that. Just lean back in your chair and surf around. Especially useful when your mouse run out of batteries as well