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.