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Re: insight about weird flash

for

From: Al Sparber
Date: Nov 30, 2009 10:35AM

From: "Andrew Kirkpatrick" < <EMAIL REMOVED> >

> Unfortunately there is no perfect solution for this yet. The problem is
> that Flash Player uses MSAA for the accessibility API, and MSAA requires a
> window id. So, if there is no window for the Flash Player (in the
> windowless modes, transparent and opaque) then we don't have a good way to
> pass the accessibility information through. There are some new ideas that
> we're investigating to address this since this issue is coming up more
> than ever.
>
>
>
> In the meantime, I'm sure that developers can come up with more and better
> ideas than I can, but here's my take on a couple of common situations:

Hi Andrew,

For years, we've kept and updated a Knowledge Base item [1] that addresses
wmode in its role of making drop-down menus appear over adjacent Flash.
About 6 months ago, we started getting support calls from Mac users that go
something like this:

"I've got a Flash banner under my menu and when I operate the menu it works
fine in Safari and Firefox on OS X, but in Safari and Firefox and IE on
Windows, the menu drops down behind my Flash."

We look at the page in Leopard or Snow Leopard and sure enough it works
fine - and on Windows it does not. The Flash deployment on these pages is
either old-fashioned embed/object with no script, or the old Macromedia
Active Content script, neither of which deploy wmode by default.

So the only conclusion is that Apple is somehow doing a wmode (transparent
or opaque) type of thing internally, or the flash Player available for Macs
has some new and undocumented "features".

Of course, Flash deployed with Adobe's new modified swfObject scripts gets
wmode opaque automatically. Which, in light of your accessibility
revelation, is maybe not a good thing.

I hope you can shed some light on this because it's driving me crazy :-)


[1] http://www.projectseven.com/go/127

--
Al Sparber - PVII
http://www.projectseven.com
Dreamweaver Menus | Galleries | Widgets
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