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RE: Accessible Flash

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From: Andrew Kirkpatrick
Date: Feb 13, 2006 12:00PM

Hi,

JAWS support was introduced in version 4.5 which came out in August
2002. Window-Eyes support was in version 4.2, in March 2002. If you
need to create a non-flash version for backward compatibility reasons,
you need to target a standard installation circa early 2002. The first
accessible version of Flash was available nearly 4 years ago (with JAWS
support three and a half years ago), so you are now talking about
software that is getting old by most standards. [



The only way to be 100% forward and backward compatible is to create a
plain HTML version with javascript and CSS that is highly limited. In
cases where this is a requirement, many designers create an html version
of the Flash site. In these cases, the Flash needs to be accessible
also.



The Couloir example is nice indeed, but it has issues. Did you trying
using the keyboard with it? Without a screen reader shift+tab works but
tab does not. I'm willing to bet that this is not the only keyboard
issue.



With the extensive use of js in this example, you are very likely to run
into issues with older screen readers as well as newer versions. The
commonly stated theory is that the scripts should degrade gracefully,
but most screen reader users use their browser with scripting on, but
there are substantial difficulties in dealing with the information
created or modified with scripts. Creating a noscript version is a nice
idea, but in practice doesn't work. Noscript content is not read by
JAWS, which alone make the strategy questionable, but when the web
application makes effective use of javascript it may be that the
solution for users without scripting is a multiple page equivalent that
covers the same ground that the script-enabled app does.



AWK


________________________________

From: <EMAIL REMOVED>
[mailto: <EMAIL REMOVED> ] On Behalf Of Schuffman,
Jan (General Services - ADA)
Sent: Monday, February 13, 2006 11:20 AM
To: WebAIM Discussion List
Subject: RE: [WebAIM] Accessible Flash



(Long-time list serv lurker here, seldom poster) My $.02 - I
agree with Leonie. Yes, it's possible to build accessible Flash and yes,
the more modern versions of the industry-standard screen readers can
then render it, but those screen readers can be phenomenally expensive,
and many users' financial situations preclude even upgrading. JAWS,
industry-standard in screen readers, costs as much as $600 just for an
upgrade and $900-1100 for a full install, so many people will use their
legacy versions until they are completely non-functional.



The time will come when most of the visitors who use screen
readers will have software that plays nice with Flash. Till then,
though, my party line continues to be to avoid Flash or, if it must be
used, to make sure a visitor has a chance to opt out of it for an
accessible page before the Flash begins.



Note that this is different from having Flash auto-start if a
player is detected on a computer. A couple who are friends of mine now
have two computers but before they did, it was rough. "He" is 100% blind
and uses JAWS. "She" is not, and enjoys Flash. Whenever he was online
and encountered Flash with an auto-detect and auto-start, he was stuck,
since she had loaded a Flash player on their shared computer. Much
better to ask the user which he/she prefers - the Flash or non-Flash
version of a page.