Thanks

Thanks

After working on flash and accessibility for almost 2 years now, I feel we can do it easily if we are really willing to do it. It’s pretty easy (revolving in certain properties of accessibility) but damn painful if our approach is wrong while implementing accessibility in flash.

peace, veiky

I like flash, and I spend most of time writing my best semantic, accessible degradable XHTML/JavaScript. I’m in the middle of an email conversations with a clients “technical advisor” trying to explain to them how to use flash properly and it is a struggle.

Perhaps Adobe could do more to promote nicer ways of using it, but it wouldn’t be good business practice since the right way to use it is sparingly.

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2007/07/best-uses-of-flash.html

Flash has its place, and steps can be taken to make it accessible, but it is just another browser plugin. When used to add “rich content” to web pages, it’s great. When used to try and completely replace web pages, it’s crap.

But the core points of both our posts are clear – there’s great work and progress happening because of HTML/CSS based developers working with and alongside Flash developers.

I’ll note that the argument of Flash Sucks is based on a piece Jakob Nielsen wrote in 2000, one he himself largely refuted a year later.

To be honest, my gut feeling is that building an accessible Rich Internet Application is going to be easier with Flash than it is with the current range of Ajax techniques. Accessible Ajax in a practical sense is very much in its infancy. Much of this is because with Flash you have to do a little extra to make sure that its accessible. With HTML and CSS its largely there, and we Ajax developers are expecting the same effort of “don’t do stupid things” will be enough to have an accessible Ajax application. Its a developer mindset, the accessible Ajax developer has to start thinking like an accessible Flash developer – the accessible Flash developer is already there.

I will not be surprised if some of the leap-forwards in accessibility techniques come from, or have been previously used, in Flash applications.

I’d point to Niqui’s Flash colour filter technique for alleviating colour-contrast issues (for both colour-blind and dyslexic visitors) as a recent example of where Flash developers can teach us web developers how to solve particular accessibility problems. Even larger than that – Niqui’s demonstration should be taken up by browser manufacturers as a way of implementing browser-based colour filtering. I need to blog that example in particular.

Oh, happy plus-1000 posts!

Mike