Flash vs Traditional Screen shot tutorials

Does anyone have any usability/accessibility statistics and ROI cost/benefit
for the difference in either developing online software tutorials via normal
markup and screen shots or doing it via Flash (and making Flash as
accessible as possible).

How accessible is Flash these days, I'm always reluctant to believe company
sales pitch, and would rather get the opinions of the likes of people on
this list.

http://www.webaim.org/techniques/flash/ is not very encouraging at all, but
has Flash 2004 improved on FlashMX?  If it has, maybe WebAIM should update
this review.

http://www.markme.com/accessibility/ I don't know what's happened to Bob's
Blog, but it has been a barren wasteland for a long time.

http://www.alistapart.com/articles/unclear/ Joe's article is dated 2000, I
wonder how much things have changed.  Maybe, I not enough?

http://www.nngroup.com/reports/accessibility/flash/ and I don't take much
notice of Jacob since his about face on Flash coincided with his consultancy
role at macromedia (also, his own Accessibility standards
(http://www.nngroup.com/reports/accessibility/), at least to me, show that
he does not have anywhere near the real understanding of accessibility
issues that the people who frequent this list do).

Then what happens even if you do use Flash2004 with users with old versions.
The systems message is not very helpful as it tells you it doesn't have it
installed and would you like to download and install it.  My first thought
when I see something like this. when I know I have an application installed
is that some spyware is trying to download itself.  I think a lot of users
may feel the same way.  It should identify that it is an older version and
ask the user if they want to update to a new version.

Geoff

Received on Tuesday, 22 June 2004 21:33:31 UTC