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Thread: Flash accessibility test

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Number of posts in this thread: 4 (In chronological order)

From: Dean Hamack
Date: Tue, Dec 23 2008 11:25AM
Subject: Flash accessibility test
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OK, I figured out there was a small problem in my logic the other day with
regards to providing alternate content to screenreaders.

The way swfobject.js works is to detect Flash, and if it finds it, set the
alternate content to "display:none". As we know, this also hides it from the
screenreader. So I made an alteration to swfobject.js to move the content
off the page instead. Anyone care to test it out?

http://www.cooperspack.com/dev/

Note that this is just the first page and none of the links work yet.

From: Patrick Burke
Date: Tue, Dec 23 2008 1:00PM
Subject: Re: Flash accessibility test
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Hi Dean & all,

Not sure if this is a good test ...

With Jaws 10 & Flash 10 installed, I get:

IE7: "Untitled Document", with no indicator of links or Flash content.

Firefox 3: "Untitled Document" with no links. It indicates
"Flash Movie Start" & "Flash movie end", but shows no content.

Patrick

At 10:20 AM 12/23/2008, Dean Hamack wrote:
>OK, I figured out there was a small problem in my logic the other day with
>regards to providing alternate content to screenreaders.
>
>The way swfobject.js works is to detect Flash, and if it finds it, set the
>alternate content to "display:none". As we know, this also hides it from the
>screenreader. So I made an alteration to swfobject.js to move the content
>off the page instead. Anyone care to test it out?
>
>http://www.cooperspack.com/dev/
>
>Note that this is just the first page and none of the links work yet.
>
>
>

From: Benjamin Hawkes-Lewis
Date: Tue, Dec 23 2008 1:15PM
Subject: Re: Flash accessibility test
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On 23/12/08 18:20, Dean Hamack wrote:
> OK, I figured out there was a small problem in my logic the other day with
> regards to providing alternate content to screenreaders.
>
> The way swfobject.js works is to detect Flash, and if it finds it, set the
> alternate content to "display:none".

No. SWFObject detects Flash, then replaces the alternate content with a
Flash object.

In every case in the SWFObject code ( http://tinyurl.com/8vybb2 ) where
display: none; is applied, it is being applied to a Flash object not
alternate content.

> As we know, this also hides it from the
> screenreader. So I made an alteration to swfobject.js to move the content
> off the page instead. Anyone care to test it out?
>
> http://www.cooperspack.com/dev/
>
> Note that this is just the first page and none of the links work yet.

If you inspect the DOM with Firebug, you'll note that the alternate
content is been removed from the DOM when the Flash is loaded.

Note also that, even if the alternate content were just moved
off-screen, if publisher CSS was not applied you'd see both the Flash
and non-Flash versions one after another.

--
Benjamin Hawkes-Lewis

From: Dean Hamack
Date: Tue, Dec 23 2008 10:55PM
Subject: Re: Flash accessibility test
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Thanks for the responses gentlemen. I read the article on Flash
accessibility on the Webaim site, and it actually sounds a lot better in
practice than I had heard. So I made a second page using the accessibility
settings and removed the wmode attribute so the screenreader could access
the flash movie.

Once again, the links aren't all set up yet, but I'd be curious to see if
this example works better:

http://www.cooperspack.com/dev/playground.php

Thanks again.