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Flash, absolute positioning and font resizing

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From: Stephane Deschamps
Date: Feb 8, 2006 8:15AM

Hi all,

and thanks for the great daily input :)

There's a Flash animation that cycles endlessly in a sidebar. The trouble
with JAWS is that once it gets inside the animation it gets trapped
inside, with no way to get out easily, it seems.

The solution I've found is to put the Flash call at the end of the source
code in a div, and then use a little JS to put it back into its right
place via absolute positioning.

Thus screen readers won't see it until the end of the page, and hopefully
they'll have found what they needed before the end of the page. I know
it's not 100% bulletproof but considering we can't modify the Flash
animations, it's the safest thing I've found.

You can have a look at the solution in action here:
<http://www.espaceclient.francetelecom.com/>;

I know, I know, what about people with no JS? Well, it's the lesser evil.
I rather have people *not* see the animation *if* they don't have JS
enabled (less probable) than block screen readers. It's an ad and as such
is dispensable, in the worst case scenario.

Yet when someone resizes their fonts in the browser, the div being
absolutely positioned, doesn't follow te flow of the document.

I thought I'd try to reposition this div if need be, but felt that a
setInterval() method would be computer-intensive. Of course the onresize
event is not triggered on font resizing.

What do you think would be the safer method to still exclude the Flash
animation from the flow and still position it where it should be?

Maye I'm just mistaken and setInterval() would do the trick efficiently.


--
Stephane Deschamps
personal: http://nota-bene.org/
org: http://evolt.org/
french org: http://pompage.net/