WebAIM - Web Accessibility In Mind

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Flash animation and accessibility on a particular web page.

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From: Birkir R. Gunnarsson
Date: Nov 5, 2012 8:23AM

Hi everyone

I will never turn this into some sort of personal service request
list, no worries, but I am faced with a particularly urgent problem,
one that reflects the wider concern for Flash, animation and
accessibility, a popular topic though not mentioned lately on this
list, as far as I remember.
The website
www.ruv.is
(the website of the Icelandic National Public Radio), seems to have
just putting started a lot of Flash objects, pictures and ads on their
page. At least my screen reading software loses focus all the time,
jumps around, and I have gotten a deluge of complaints from our blind
and VI users (this plays havoc with screen magnifiers as well), that
the page has suddenly become completely inaccessible (funny since I
have done a lot of work with them on ARIA accessibility, labelling
buttons etc .. goes to show our work can be frustrating as well as
fun.
Just out of professional curiosity, could anyone check over the page
for me to confirm that Flash is the issue, and if you have pointers to
the latest Flash accessibility guides, could you please post. I point
people to a very good WebAIM guide, though a few years old, that
discusses how Flash is more accessible if it is set to Transparent,
and it will subsequently be ignored by screen readers/magnifiers.
Are there any updates to this, and are there ways to keep these Flash
objects on the page for sighted users (well, for who I do not know,
since these are not exactly popular with anyone), without messing up
accessibility for visually impaired users? Or is the only snesible
suggestion I can make to take these out altogether, at least the
animation part? How would you handle this folks. Always a pleasure to
follow discussions on this list and to be able to occasionally tap
into the wealth of expertese here is simply an honor.

Cheers
-Birkir