I just noticed that this blog turns smilies into images, but the alt text is the punctuation characters, so it is just as bad. Perhaps it would be beneficial to write a plugin or something that explained a smiley better for alt text. Anyone good at PHP?

My suggestion is no good for distributed themes, that’s true. But the people making those, usually know their stuff.

This was a helpful tip by the way, never thought about screen readers before. I’ll keep those in mind from now on, reading all the punctuation out loud can be really annoying.

How do they handle smilies? That would be really annoying, if those too were read out loud as punctuation!

I appreciate the call to not use punctuation characters for the gap between post name and blog name when you set up the title, but I don’t think you have to be as strict as never using them. I like what you have done with yours and admittedly my double colon is the best of delimiters, but I think you really should only avoid the very verbose named characters. Anyone using a screen reader is used to punctuation being read out, but no-one wants to sit through “left-pointing double angle quotation mark”. I think things like colons, hyphens and other short delimiters are ok. There was a discussion about this a long while ago and this is the only link I could find on it: http://www.standards-schmandards.com/2004/the-sound-of-the-accessible-title-tag-separator/