Blogger and Screen Reader Accessibility

So, while I'm all fever insomnia-ed, (**sigh,** AGAIN,) I've been working on auditing les blogs for compatibility with ARIA standards, using FAE and WAVE- and man, this stuff is tough. While Blogger defaults for the most part are pretty ok, a lot of the templates and widgets need some cleaning up. For the templates, it's mostly just the small matter of adding a lang="en" tag and replacing the odd spacer image with CSS, but a lot of the widgets in particular generate images without explanatory alts, and I can't get at the code to add them.

The mobile version might be a bit better, as all the widgets are stripped out. FAE doesn't like it much, WAVE rates it more or less alright. I haven't tried actually navigating it with a screen reader yet, so I couldn't say for sure. If it works out, great- we'll just link it at the top. Otherwise, I may just ditch the widgets for a bunch of hand-coded sidebar, instead.

In the mean time, in the interest of at least making our RSS feed more screen reader friendly, I'm making a few Best Blogging Practices resolutions:

1. Stop abusing the alt tag for mouseover text, and use title, like we were supposed to all along, people.
2. Replace italics with <em></em> tags. Because man, if there is one thing I love, it is being emphatic.
3. Use the /emote convention instead of bracketing with asterisks, (e.g. /sigh instead of the **sigh** above, so that it reads "slash sigh" instead of "asterisk asterisk sigh asterisk asterisk".) 
4. Try to cut down on the emoticons. (Maybe I can put these in ARIA labelled blocks, so that ^_^; reads "awkward smile" or something? I'll download a JAWS demo and play around with this a bit later.)

Anyway, I've only just begun to skim the documentation on WIA-ARIA standards and markup, so I'm sure I'll find lots of room for improvement, here and elsewhere.