This was all pretty informative, and I thank you for taking the time to type it all out. Basically I guess I got caught in the trap of not considering other use cases -- I'd been considering that if I were reading a thread and the site decided not to load icons for some reason, everything would still make sense if the alt text read, say, Cecil Harvey: Yay! (because it would indicate who the character is, and the general tone of the icon). BUT, I don't know how informative that would be for an RPer using a screenreader, or even for another sighted RPer, really -- and besides which, icons in RP have a slightly different use than on the rest of the site anyway. (And then, come to think of it, there are people who don't bother keywording their icons -- although I doubt that they would bother writing descriptions either -- and people who use song lyrics or whatever as keywords.) OKAY this was mostly rambling to myself but I hope it explains where I was coming from.
ANYWAY. All of what you're saying makes sense, and I guess I'll go and figure out some descriptions for my icons.
That last part about the comment hierarchy thing is pretty cool. I tried browsing LJ with Lynx once and couldn't figure out what comments were replying to which. It was highly frustrating. So +1 to you all for coming up with a fix for that!
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ANYWAY. All of what you're saying makes sense, and I guess I'll go and figure out some descriptions for my icons.
That last part about the comment hierarchy thing is pretty cool. I tried browsing LJ with Lynx once and couldn't figure out what comments were replying to which. It was highly frustrating. So +1 to you all for coming up with a fix for that!