Comments on: Accessibility and Flex: we can do better.

By: majordan

majordan — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 18:16:31 +0000

I’m suprised this post didn’t catch my attention when you posted it.

You may be aware of this already, but Adobe has just released draft documentation explaining how to create custom accessibility implementations for Flex components using the flash.accessibility.AccessibilityImplementation class, which has been undocumented until now.

From my understanding, they’ve released the documents as a draft in order to solicit comments from the developer community, and I’m sure they’d be interested in your feedback if you have the time to offer it.

By: coderkind

coderkind — Fri, 09 May 2008 10:14:22 +0000

I emailed Adobe well over a year ago about their outdated accessibilty documentation for Flex and was told they were going to update it. I also emailed Mozilla highlighting that you couldn’t tab in and out of Flash content as you can in IE. Again, it was something they were aware of but seemingly haven’t gotten round to fixing yet (not sure if it’s fixed in Firefox 3). I think as long as the basics from a legal point of view are covered we’re not going to see dramatic inroads into any of this. I’d love to be proved wrong.

From what I’ve read on other sites, it sounds like SWFObject is going to be incorporated into Flash 10 as the default embed method. Adobe should go further and incorporate as much accessibility support as possible in all aspects of delivering Flash to the end user.

By: Stephen Buckley

Stephen Buckley — Tue, 06 May 2008 16:35:11 +0000

I raised this fairly recently with Matt Chotin. There is some talk of improving the accessibility of AIR for the next release.
I am currently working for a large e-learning provider and accessibility is one of our conciderations for courseware 90% of which is done in Flash. There is a continum in most flash developers minds with enyjoyablity/features at one end and accessibility at the other, but this does not always need to be the case, it does however require careful design. There are however all sort of issues. There is no clear cross platform screen reader solution available that works on both Mac and PC that Air hook into, so its a patchy situation to say the least. Its is probably too much to ask for AIR to have its own screen reader

By: Marc Hughes

Marc Hughes — Mon, 05 May 2008 12:46:02 +0000

The biggest problem with accessibility in Flash is that most developers don’t care. Simply going through and enabling the Flex accessibility compiler option is only the first step. It bugs me when someone claims to have a 100% accessible app just because they turned on that checkbox. Things like keyboard only access, using higher contrast text, and not using color as the sole status indicator are all equally important. (There’s longer lists, go check out cast.org or section508.gov)

You really need to be thinking about these issues in the design stage of an application. Just yesterday I blogged about a design review that I had attended where a potentially bad accessibility design was presented.

http://www.rogue-development.com/blog2/2008/05/03/keyboard-access-drag-and-drop/

Keyboard only access for an applications is probably the second biggest thing you could do to help people out, but the Flex API for setting up a simple tab ordering scheme sucks for everything except the most simple of applications.

Oh, and AIR doesn’t support screen readers? WTF?

By: Sander

Sander — Sat, 03 May 2008 23:08:16 +0000

Very true! I support accessibility!

And finally, an Aral blog post that’s not way over my head