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Thread: insight about weird flash

Number of posts in this thread: 16 (In chronological order)

From: Carin Headrick
Date: Fri, Nov 20 2009 10:55AM
Subject: insight about weird flash
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Hi. Well, I figure I'm here, I might as well jump right into picking brains.

I was asked to check a site over for accessibility issues. Oh me oh my, they have some work to do. The headings, ug, the graphics, ug, the strange labeling of links, ug ug ug, but my biggest issue is how come JAWS skips right over the play buttons for the movies? The page is http://www.edmedia.tv/Default.php?pID=16

I can't find a single play button on the page, although they appear to be bleedin' obvious to anyone with eyeballs. Apparently System Access-users can also find them. I thought it was due to them coded in shockwave flash, but then I saw the following page: http://www.paulspond.com/index.php?entry=21
and I can see those fine.

Thank you in advance for any help at all.

Carin

From: Andrew Kirkpatrick
Date: Fri, Nov 20 2009 11:05AM
Subject: Re: insight about weird flash
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Your culprit: s1.addParam("wmode","transparent");

They are using a windowless mode and don't even need to here. If they change this to
s1.addParam("wmode","window");

then you can do some further testing.

Thanks,
AWK

Andrew Kirkpatrick

Senior Product Manager, Accessibility

Adobe Systems

= EMAIL ADDRESS REMOVED =

From: Carin Headrick
Date: Fri, Nov 20 2009 11:10AM
Subject: Re: insight about weird flash
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Thank you thank you thank you! I knew you guys could set me straight! Yea!

Carin
----- Original Message -----
From: Andrew Kirkpatrick
To: WebAIM Discussion List
Sent: Friday, November 20, 2009 1:04 PM
Subject: Re: [WebAIM] insight about weird flash

Your culprit: s1.addParam("wmode","transparent");

They are using a windowless mode and don't even need to here. If they change this to
s1.addParam("wmode","window");

then you can do some further testing.

Thanks,
AWK

Andrew Kirkpatrick

Senior Product Manager, Accessibility

Adobe Systems

= EMAIL ADDRESS REMOVED =

From: Andrew Kirkpatrick
Date: Fri, Nov 20 2009 11:20AM
Subject: Re: insight about weird flash
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You can prove it to yourself and the site owner by checking out http://www.edmedia.tv/player.swf - this is their player UI loaded into your browser window directly. Since there is no WMODE set explicitly it defaults to "window" and you can access the controls. There is no view loaded in this case, but this allows you to test the UI.

It is a useful trick for testing to know that you can ferret out the URL for a SWF asset and test it directly, especially when the site is built with the wrong WMODE setting.

Thanks,
AWK

Andrew Kirkpatrick

Senior Product Manager, Accessibility

Adobe Systems

= EMAIL ADDRESS REMOVED =

From: Hoffman, Allen
Date: Fri, Nov 20 2009 12:30PM
Subject: Re: insight about weird flash
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Try using Object Inspector and see if the buttons are exposed.

From: Carin Headrick
Date: Fri, Nov 20 2009 1:55PM
Subject: Re: insight about weird flash
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Object inspector? What's that? Does JAWS have an object inspector?

Carin
----- Original Message -----
From: Hoffman, Allen
To: WebAIM Discussion List
Sent: Friday, November 20, 2009 2:29 PM
Subject: Re: [WebAIM] insight about weird flash

Try using Object Inspector and see if the buttons are exposed.

From: Don Mauck
Date: Fri, Nov 20 2009 2:00PM
Subject: Re: insight about weird flash
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No Jaws does not. Object inspector is just a tool to inspect objects, if you Google it you will find several. There is one called create your own Object Inspector that might work with Jaws, just haven't tried it yet.

Regards,
Don

Oracle
Don Mauck | Accessibility Evangelist
Oracle Corporate Architecture Group
7700 Technology Way
Denver CO 80237
Phone (303) 334-4184
Email = EMAIL ADDRESS REMOVED =

Green Oracle

Oracle is committed to developing practices and products that help protect the environment

From: Mills, Teresa
Date: Sun, Nov 22 2009 3:25PM
Subject: Re: insight about weird flash
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wmode="opaque" or "transparent" will hide the movie from assistive technology. Therefore, the problem lies in the code: s1.addParam("wmode","transparent"); and the code will not be exposed so that you can read the information in AT or Object Inspector. Set wmode to windows.

From: Hoffman, Allen
Date: Mon, Nov 23 2009 7:05AM
Subject: Re: insight about weird flash
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Object Inspector is Microsoft's inspection tool.
Inspect32.
there is a newer version called UI-SPI which includes UIA support.

From: Andrew Kirkpatrick
Date: Mon, Nov 23 2009 7:15AM
Subject: Re: insight about weird flash
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From: Al Sparber
Date: Mon, Nov 23 2009 10:20AM
Subject: Re: insight about weird flash
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From: "Andrew Kirkpatrick" < = EMAIL ADDRESS REMOVED = >

> wmode="opaque" or "transparent" will hide the movie from assistive
> technology. Therefore, the problem lies in the code:
> s1.addParam("wmode","transparent"); and the code will not be exposed so
> that you can read the information in AT or Object Inspector. Set wmode to
> windows.
>
> Just "window", no 's'... :)

What then does someone do when needing to have positioned content appear on
top of a Flash piece?

--
Al Sparber - PVII
http://www.projectseven.com
Dreamweaver Menus | Galleries | Widgets
http://www.projectseven.com/go/apm
An Accessible & Elegant Accordion

From: Kinnunen,Daniel (DARS)
Date: Mon, Nov 23 2009 11:05AM
Subject: Re: insight about weird flash
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Allen, do you mean UI Spy? I did a quick search and found it is part of the Microsoft Windows SDK. If that is it, do you know if it is possible to get the program files without downloading the whole SDK?

For those not familiar with the other tool mentioned by Allen, Inspect (or inspect32) is a tool in the Microsoft Active Accessibility SDK. Google "inspect32" to find the download on the Microsoft site. It is very useful when testing accessibility of software applications on Windows. Usually you are interested in the Name, Role, State, and Value properties.

Dan Kinnunen
DARS Accessibility Specialist

From: Chris Hoffman
Date: Fri, Nov 27 2009 10:00AM
Subject: Re: insight about weird flash
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On Mon, Nov 23, 2009 at 12:20 PM, Al Sparber < = EMAIL ADDRESS REMOVED = > wrote:
> From: "Andrew Kirkpatrick" < = EMAIL ADDRESS REMOVED = >
>
>> [summary: Setting the wmode of a Flash object to "window" will allow it to be detected by assistive technology, while setting it to
>> "transparent" or "opaque" will hide it from AT.]
>
> What then does someone do when needing to have positioned content appear on
> top of a Flash piece?

I'm curious about this too. I have run into a couple of instances
where positioned content (such as a modal dialog) has had Flash
content in the background show through, and have found/been told/read
on the Internet that setting the Flash object's wmode to "opaque" or
"transparent" would keep that from happening. But if that will make
the content inaccessible, what should we do?

Can we switch the wmode to "opaque" when the dialog is displayed, and
then reset it to "window" when the dialog is dismissed?

Chris

From: Andrew Kirkpatrick
Date: Mon, Nov 30 2009 7:05AM
Subject: Re: insight about weird flash
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Unfortunately there is no perfect solution for this yet. The problem is that Flash Player uses MSAA for the accessibility API, and MSAA requires a window id. So, if there is no window for the Flash Player (in the windowless modes, transparent and opaque) then we don't have a good way to pass the accessibility information through. There are some new ideas that we're investigating to address this since this issue is coming up more than ever.

In the meantime, I'm sure that developers can come up with more and better ideas than I can, but here's my take on a couple of common situations:

1) dynamic drop down menus that open up and need to cover other content when open. If the content that the menu needs to cover is Flash, then the WMODE needs to be opaque or transparent, but this is a problem for screen reader users. In this situation something needs to give.

a. If your menus are set up such that a click to the top menu item (the one in view when the menu is closed) takes the user to a page that contains the sub-menu links then you could take advantage of the Flash Player's ability to detect the presence of a MSAA client (e.g. a screen reader) and change the menus so that they don't open for that audience only.

b. Alternatively, you could load the page with WMODE=window only when an assistive technology user is using the site. You can't change wmode dynamically however, once there is no window you can't make it appear without reloading the page, so these options are easiest within a site where users are logged in and can provide preferences.

c. Authors could also provide a link to view the Flash content in a separate window, although this won't work for all types of Flash content.

In my opinion, I prefer to detect for AT users and reload the page, maintaining the data that the user is an AT user throughout their experience on a site.

2) JS-based dialogs - two options that I can think of off the cuff.

a. For simple dialogs/popups, when an AT user is on the site, use the standard JavaScript dialog windows instead.

b. For more complex dialogs, again you can detect the AT user in Flash and then instead of creating the floating dialogs, just insert the content into the page in a logical location.

I do understand that these represent extra work and removing the "extra work" tax on accessibility to the greatest extent possible is desirable and will make more content accessible because it won't require as much of a resource investment. However, for now this is where WMODE is at. If anyone has other workarounds, let me know, I'm interested in hearing about them.

Thanks,

AWK

Andrew Kirkpatrick

Senior Product Manager, Accessibility

Adobe Systems

= EMAIL ADDRESS REMOVED =

From: Al Sparber
Date: Mon, Nov 30 2009 10:35AM
Subject: Re: insight about weird flash
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From: "Andrew Kirkpatrick" < = EMAIL ADDRESS REMOVED = >

> Unfortunately there is no perfect solution for this yet. The problem is
> that Flash Player uses MSAA for the accessibility API, and MSAA requires a
> window id. So, if there is no window for the Flash Player (in the
> windowless modes, transparent and opaque) then we don't have a good way to
> pass the accessibility information through. There are some new ideas that
> we're investigating to address this since this issue is coming up more
> than ever.
>
>
>
> In the meantime, I'm sure that developers can come up with more and better
> ideas than I can, but here's my take on a couple of common situations:

Hi Andrew,

For years, we've kept and updated a Knowledge Base item [1] that addresses
wmode in its role of making drop-down menus appear over adjacent Flash.
About 6 months ago, we started getting support calls from Mac users that go
something like this:

"I've got a Flash banner under my menu and when I operate the menu it works
fine in Safari and Firefox on OS X, but in Safari and Firefox and IE on
Windows, the menu drops down behind my Flash."

We look at the page in Leopard or Snow Leopard and sure enough it works
fine - and on Windows it does not. The Flash deployment on these pages is
either old-fashioned embed/object with no script, or the old Macromedia
Active Content script, neither of which deploy wmode by default.

So the only conclusion is that Apple is somehow doing a wmode (transparent
or opaque) type of thing internally, or the flash Player available for Macs
has some new and undocumented "features".

Of course, Flash deployed with Adobe's new modified swfObject scripts gets
wmode opaque automatically. Which, in light of your accessibility
revelation, is maybe not a good thing.

I hope you can shed some light on this because it's driving me crazy :-)

[1] http://www.projectseven.com/go/127

--
Al Sparber - PVII
http://www.projectseven.com
Dreamweaver Menus | Galleries | Widgets
http://www.projectseven.com/go/apm
An Accessible & Elegant Accordion

From: Al Sparber
Date: Fri, Dec 11 2009 5:18PM
Subject: Re: insight about weird flash
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From: "Al Sparber" < = EMAIL ADDRESS REMOVED = >

> From: "Andrew Kirkpatrick" < = EMAIL ADDRESS REMOVED = >

> Hi Andrew,
>
> So the only conclusion is that Apple is somehow doing a wmode (transparent
> or opaque) type of thing internally, or the flash Player available for
> Macs has some new and undocumented "features".
>
> Of course, Flash deployed with Adobe's new modified swfObject scripts gets
> wmode opaque automatically. Which, in light of your accessibility
> revelation, is maybe not a good thing.
>
> I hope you can shed some light on this because it's driving me crazy :-)
>
>
> [1] http://www.projectseven.com/go/127

Hi Andrew,

Any info yet?

--
Al Sparber - PVII
http://www.projectseven.com