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RE: Flash and forms mode

for

From: Andrew Kirkpatrick
Date: Feb 28, 2006 1:30PM

Priti,

We have created a form in flash consisting of three edit fields
and a submit button. The catch is when I tested the same with JAWS 7.0,
it failed to come out of forms mode after clicking on the 'Submit'
button.

The form created has one more component in it, i. e. Data Grid,
that displays the data imputed in the text fields, the Data Grid gets
up-dated on the click of the 'Submit' button, but JAWS is still in forms
mode. I have to manually turn off forms mode, in order to read the
information displayed in the Data Grid.

I also tested the form with JAWS 5.0 and Win-eyes 5.5 and
surprisingly the same problem was encountered. I am wondering, if forms
can be made completely accessible using flash. We are using Macromedia
Flash Professional 8 for creating forms.

Screen readers make decisions when interacting with Flash content (and
javascript content) about whether an action amounts to the type of
change that should affect the interaction mode or trigger a
reconstruction of the off-screen model. In this case, it sounds like
the behavior you're describing is what I'd expect. The user is still
interacting with the same form and the flash screen has not refreshed in
any substantial way, so staying in forms mode is the right behavior.

Make sure that you are enabling accessibility for the datagrid and
screen reader users will be able to hear the content. Add the following
actionscript to enable accessiblity for the grid:

import mx.accessibility.DataGridAccImpl;
DataGridAccImpl.enableAccessibility();

Hope this helps,
AWK