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Flash and keyboard navigation

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From: Tom Gilder
Date: Oct 8, 2002 5:23AM

Hi, I've just been looking into the problems with embedded Flash
movies and keyboard navigation. For instance, if you go to
Macromedia's home page (http://www.macromedia.com) and try to tab
through the page, you immediately get "stuck" in the first movie.

I had this problem myself a few weeks ago, where there was a small
movie with a simple vector animation (and yes it had a text backup),
but it was catching the tab order and never letting go.

Someone suggested setting the param "wmode" to "transparent" would fix
it, which it did. For some reason this totally takes the movie out of
tabbing order, so if there were actually any links within the movie
they'd be inaccessible.

Luckily there aren't any in this case, but if I'm ever forced to use
Flash with links, buttons or inputs in the future I'm concerned that
it'll totally muck-up keyboard navigation.

Does anyone have a fix for this problem (preferably just through
setting an <object> param)?

All this talk of accessibility from MM needs to actually be backed up
with some action it seems to me. After all, what's the point in
letting screen readers read a page when you can't tab through it..?


Cheers
--
Tom Gilder
http://tom.me.uk/


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