That looks beautiful to me! Thanks for the test.
I did a quick & stupid test myself, just filling out a couple alt= tags with “ALT” (any idiot could come up with a better string)… And here’s how it looks, compare with previous shot above:
The value seems pretty clear… The site remains functional, and anyone who is physically disabled and using a screen-reader will appreciate the alt= tags being filled-out.
There’s at least a dozen ways avatars can fail to load. My own screenshots were with image loading disabled in Firefox settings, NOT a “404”. But I’ve been seeing this problem, daily, because of CloudFlare’s captchas, coming up because of shared public IPs.
Discourse works fine when the font doesn’t download… You just see random symbols, instead of proper icons, but the elements are still there, and you can mouse-over for a description, and click on them as needed.
Discourse already fails more gracefully than most sites, if the JS doesn’t load… At least you can continue to read everything, which isn’t universally true.
The avatars have an order of magnitude more failure modes… And it seems a trivially easy fix for Discourse to continue working when the avatars don’t load.
My apologies for what a mess this bug report discussion has turned into. Certainly not intended.