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RE: flash satay firefox bug

for

From: Rainer Wagener
Date: May 23, 2005 7:32AM

Hi Patrick,

> flash content embedded this way swallows
> the tab focus, making it impossible to
> proceed beyond the movie when using
> keyboard navigation.

on your test page:

http://www.splintered.co.uk/experiments/76/

Jason Davis points to the CSS method { -moz-user-focus:ignore; }
which avoids getting stuck inside a flash object in Gecko Browsers.
When I first run into this method I thought it to be a good solution
for the 'flash satay firefox bug' at least when there is no need of
focusing the flash object. But besides not being able to use the
flash object as a button there is another problem: Once you turn off
CSS the site is no longer tabable what I suggest to be quite a
serious accessiblity issue.

After trying out all possible and may be some impossible ways of
embedding flash accessible in Geckos and producing valide code at
the same time, I came to the conclusion that the Java Script method
is the best way to do it.

> No, the issue does not appear with FlashObject, because
> the javascript
> effectively includes the flash with an (invalid, although
> working) EMBED
> element, rather than a pure OBJECT. The source validates,
> as the invalid
> markup is added client side. Some may call it cheating,
> or going against
> the whole idea of the spec...but I'll leave *that* discussion for
> another day...

Yes, it is cheating somehow. But as long as browsers simply do not
support the specs, one has to be tricky.
We don't produce websites for the specs but for people. It's more
important to provide accessibility and usability as well than
following rules that possibly get your visitors stuck somewhere in a
flash object.

Regards Rainer

--

Rainer Wagener

Webentwicklungen
Blumenstr. 57
69115 Heidelberg
Tel.: 062 21 - 60 05 81

www.rohschnitt.de