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Re: Flashy dilemma

for

From: Christian Heilmann
Date: Apr 12, 2005 4:38PM

>I am in the midst of conducting a Web accessibility audit for
>> www.neilsquire.ca (finally). I haven't worked with Flash before. Is there
>> any way to make the revolving series of pictures more accessible (and less
>> annoying)? Personally I would like to suggest a series of static images
>> instead, but that may simply be personal taste.


To make it accessible at least to the guidelines you'd need an option
to allow the user to stop the animation. That is pretty easy in flash.
Furthermore you need a non-Flash replacement. As the images are pretty
much screen furniture only, a static image with a proper alt text
inside the OBJECT tag should do the trick.


>> I also welcome other feedback. I am trying to convince them that, with
>> appropriate changes, a text-only site is not necessary -- their idea, not
>> mine! They want a professional site to appeal to potential donors and seem
>> to think that means sacrificing accessibility. Will people ever get it???


Actually a text only site is hardly ever needed, as you can do that
with appropriate style sheets. An extra page is ghettoing users and
might not be used just for that reason.
What would need to be done is to make the HTML structure a lot easier
- out with the nested tables, in with clean and mean code.

--
Chris Heilmann
Blog: http://www.wait-till-i.com
Writing: http://icant.co.uk/
Binaries: http://www.onlinetools.org/