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Re: Accessibility of Adobe Connect player/pods

for

From: Lucy Greco
Date: Dec 10, 2012 1:29PM

Hello:
Seeing this reminds me that I wanted to ask is there any instructions for
how a blind screen reader user can use ac to create and edit a video thanks
Lucy

-----Original Message-----
From: <EMAIL REMOVED>
[mailto: <EMAIL REMOVED> ] On Behalf Of Andrew
Kirkpatrick
Sent: Monday, December 10, 2012 12:03 PM
To: WebAIM Discussion List; Access Technology Higher Education Network;
Distribution list for EASI Web Conferences, Podcasts and News
Subject: Re: [WebAIM] Accessibility of Adobe Connect player/pods

Howard,
The first question that I have is what browser you're using to view the
recordings. The player is Flash-based and there are challenges getting
focus into the player on some browsers. That still works best with IE.
Once you have focus in the Connect recording player window, then you can use
the keyboard shortcuts.

It seems like there may be an issue with the new Event Overlay area - it
isn't responding as the other pods are, so appears to be blocking the use of
the Ctrl+F6 shortcut. If you tab a couple of times to get the focus past
this item then Ctrl+F6 works as expected (at least it does for me). You
mentioned Ctrl+F8 also, which doesn't do much in a recording because there
are no context menus in the recording interface's pods for this shortcut to
open.

I wasn't able to reproduce an issue with the "p" shortcut not correctly
toggling the play/pause button, except when the focus was on a text input
area and in that case the "p" was entered into the control, which I believe
is the correct behavior. Can you provide steps to reproduce?

The slider to the right of the play/pause button operates with the
right/left arrow and home/end keys. Like the "p" key, these shortcuts may
run into difficulties with JAWS grabbing the keystrokes (e.g. for next
paragraph or next/previous character). If you can provide steps to
reproduce what you are finding, that would help us. It is worth knowing
that at least for JAWS the keyboard pass-through is insert+3 so if "p" isn't
working and then you hit "insert+3" followed by "p" and it does, then we at
least know why it is happening.

I saw one other comment that the closed captioning wasn't able to be read by
a JAWS user, and that is true. The captions are hidden from AT, but the
caption pod does allow you to export a transcript of the event's captioning,
which may be easier to read for a deaf-blind user.

We'll follow up with the Connect team to make sure that we have bugs logged
for any reproducible issues, and will add more if other issues are
identified/clarified.

Thanks,
AWK

Andrew Kirkpatrick
Group Product Manager, Accessibility
Adobe Systems

<EMAIL REMOVED>
http://twitter.com/awkawk
http://blogs.adobe.com/accessibility


-----Original Message-----
From: <EMAIL REMOVED>
[mailto: <EMAIL REMOVED> ] On Behalf Of Howard Kramer
Sent: Wednesday, December 05, 2012 12:14 PM
To: WebAIM Discussion List; Access Technology Higher Education Network;
Distribution list for EASI Web Conferences, Podcasts and News
Subject: [WebAIM] Accessibility of Adobe Connect player/pods

Dear Colleagues:

(Please excuse any cross-posts.)

I wonder if anyone has an insight into the accessibility of controls/buttons
for the Adobe Connect player (I'm not sure if player is the correct
terminology - it consists of a series of what they call pods [written in
Flash action script?]). I've posted the recorded sessions for the Accessing
Higher Ground conference on the Connect platform.

The Adobe site list hotkeys that can be used with Connect, including
playback control, at -
http://help.adobe.com/en_US/connect/9.0/using/WS5ae85155c1a0214d1172e081227b
89777b-8000.html#WS5e953006aa800217-2e21eaae122a9c49b5b-8000

- but I've found that the hotkeys for playback work unreliably and
intermittently at best. Cntrl-F6 doesn't always move between the various
pods; Cntrl-F8 which is supposed to list hotkeys (or "display the pod menu
for keyboard control") doesn't work at all; many buttons are not labeled and
even the 'p' command to play/pause doesn't always work. In I.E., when the
'p' didn't work I was able to use the JAWS find to focus on the play/pause
button and at least stop/start the recording that way. I can then access the
slider control which controls fast-forward or rewind - it is labeled
thankfully - but there doesn't seem to be a hot-key to control it - i.e. to
move it.

It looks like I may have to provide the recordings on two different
platforms - Connect for those who need or prefer the captioning and another
platform for users of screenreaders and other AT.

I welcome any suggestions/insight/help anyone has on this. I know Andrew K.
follows the WebAIM list so maybe he'll chime in.

Cheers,
Howard
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