WebAIM - Web Accessibility In Mind

E-mail List Archives

Re: Flash and forms mode

for

From: priti
Date: Feb 28, 2006 10:30PM



Hi Andrew,

Thanks for the information, but we have enabled the accessibility of the Data Grid component. This is not the case, I have encountered the same problem with different flash presentations. Even in the case of flash presentations, wherein the user has to input data in the Text Input field and press 'ENTER', Jaws continues to remain in forms mode and does not read the information updated on the screen.

Regards,
Priti Rohra
Accessibility Tester
Net Systems Informatics (I) Pvt. Ltd.
India
Tel: 91-22-26860485/6 extn: 28
E-mail: <EMAIL REMOVED>
Url: www.n-syst.com

----- Original Message -----
From: Andrew Kirkpatrick
To: WebAIM Discussion List
Sent: Wednesday, March 01, 2006 1:53 AM
Subject: RE: [WebAIM] Flash and forms mode


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


------------------------------------------------------------------------------