WebAIM - Web Accessibility In Mind

E-mail List Archives

Re: Testing a flash movie

for

From: ben morrison
Date: Nov 14, 2006 2:50AM

On 11/14/06, Bob Regan < <EMAIL REMOVED> > wrote:
> Asking whether a Flash movie is accessible is more akin to asking if a
> desktop software application is accessible. It depends on how complex
> the application is and what it is doing. Take a relatively simple
> application used to display video that contains a simple play and pause
> button. Here I will ask:
>
> * Are captions for the audio displayed?
> * Does the audio play on load and thus interfere with the screen reader?
>
> * Is the button labeled for a screen reader?
> * Is the change in the button's function (play v. pause) reflected as
> the user interacts with the app?
>
> You can find a whitepaper on creating accessible Flash at:
>
> http://www.adobe.com/resources/accessibility/best_practices/best_practic
> es_acc_flash.pdf
>
> This should give you a head start. Obviously, as the application gets
> more complex, so does the evaluation of its accessibility.
>
> Measuring accessibility of the Flash app is more than turning off the
> Flash object to be sure, especially if you are assuming that the end
> user will actually interact with the Flash object itself.
>
> Feel free to send additional questions

I am not developing the flash application, it already exists, I was
asked to see how accessible it is. I couldn't find much information
available on the net for testing accessiblity of flash. I tried
keyboard navigation, which didnt work very well and I ended up
downloading a Windows Eyes Demo - the application I was testing had no
information at all for the screen reader.

ben

--
Ben Morrison