Modifying Display of Custom Profile Fields

[iacas]

I have three custom profile fields:

1. Location
2. Handedness
3. Username (to a different site)

The way "Location:" is displayed in the postbit (the cAuthorPane?) is fine.

I'd like to replace "handedness" with an image (a righty or lefty image), and I'd like to replace the username with an icon and to use that username as part of a URL.

I've messed around briefly in customFieldsDisplay.phtml of my child theme, but haven't gotten very far at all. I've discovered that even the "$value" in that file is the fully formed line, like:

Location: SoCal

So, how should I go about modifying this? It seems fairly straightforward, I'm fairly familiar with PHP (though it's been a few years doing more than the basic structural stuff) and other languages.