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Re: Technical explanation on how Flash interupts screen readers

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From: Andrew Kirkpatrick
Date: Nov 15, 2010 7:42AM

Birkir,

There are a few options, but for the banner ads the mbl.is site should tell the ad-providers to take a couple of steps to make the ads accessible. Since the banner ads that I see on the site are often just a link to the advertisement site, the structure of the Flash ad could be simplified to be an invisible button that covers the entire Flash content area, and that button has a name which is descriptive of the advertisement (e.g. "Advertisement: Bank of Iceland offers 4% 30-year mortgages with no points. Click to view details"). Then, the dynamic content that is seen (and that is likely to cause any issues you are experiencing due to refreshing content) can be hidden from assistive technologies by setting the AccessibilityProperties.silent property to true for a movie clip that contains all of the other content in the ad.

The RNIB used to have guidelines for accessible banner ads but I don't see it on their site now. I'll made up a quick example...

Thanks,
AWK

Andrew Kirkpatrick
Group Product Manager, Accessibility
Adobe Systems

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