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From: Christopher J. Phillips
Date: Tue, Nov 04 2003 8:25AM
Subject: RE: Accessible BBS/Discussion group software
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While many changes can be made to the phpBB templates to make them more accessible, my understanding is that with the 2.0 series there are some elements of the backend that make it difficult to do so completely. The folks over at accessifyforums.com have done an excellent job in working with what currently exists, but at this point most people are waiting for the release of 2.2 (no anticipated release date) which is expected to come with a fully accessible template users can select that will do a better job of separating presentation from content. There is a great discussion at:
http://www.accessifyforum.com/viewtopic.php?t=592
or do a search for accessibility at the phpbb.com forums.

Christ

From: lists
Date: Tue, Nov 04 2003 9:11AM
Subject: RE: Accessible BBS/Discussion group software
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That's a well done template!

I didn't see discussion about backend output at the accessify forum, but the
last time I looked at phpbb, I do recall that it needed to be refactored a
bit - the application layer just needs to be cleaned up and decoupled from
presentation as well as from the database and the database design could
stand a critical eyeball. Some of that coupling is probably a limitation of
using php over a more object oriented language like Python.

But, I have yet to find a proprietary bbs that offers features worth buying
over phpBB, so it seems worthwhile to just improve upon phpBB (that is the
whole idea behind open source anyway)... Although the phpBB project most
likely has plenty of programmers, if they intend to release accessible
templates, perhaps that might be expedited by volunteers from this forum?

<soapbox warning>
I see so many requests on discussion lists for free "out-of-the-box"
software, and it seems that people forget if that free out-of-the-box
software doesn't do exactly what they want it to do, they can contribute by
modifying it... Whether they modify personally or hire a developer. Instead,
I see organizations abandoning open source software in favor of purchasing
proprietary software and paying the developers of that proprietary software
to customize it for the organization's particular need.
</soapbox warning>

-chris

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