- From: Steve Vosloo <stevenvosloo@yahoo.com>
- Date: Thu, 22 Aug 2002 09:23:27 +0200
- To: "WAI IG" <w3c-wai-ig@w3.org>
Thought you might find this interesting -- about Macromedia's choice to make older Flash content available to screen readers, and how to work around that. Steve -----Original Message----- From: Deneb Meketa [mailto:dmeketa@macromedia.com] Sent: 21 August 2002 09:27 PM Subject: RE: Inaccessibility of older Flash movies Hi Steve - Thanks for your comments. It's good to know that people are using our accessibility support - even if this leads to problems! The issues you're describing are typical for older Flash content that is complex. We're looking at a retrofitting problem here: the content was developed before we had accessibility support, and now it will take some work to make the content accessible. This is a consequence of our choice to try and interpret older content for MSAA. That choice actually has great benefit for simpler legacy content - many Flash movies just suddenly start working, without any changes. The downside of this choice is that more complex legacy movies just cause a lot of babble. This kind of problem is not limited to Flash. Any complex website designed before accessibility tools were available would be likely to exhibit similar problems. Many modern DHTML pages fall into this category. There are certainly some problems with our accessibility implementation - among these are some things that you mention, like dropdown support and tabbing out of movies. The current Flash Player is really just a first version of accessibility support, far from perfect, and we're working on major improvements for the next release of the player. But some of the solution to the larger problem you're talking about (complex legacy content) must rest with content maintainers and screen readers. Content maintainers, at the least, need to take a quick look and see what their biggest problems are. If those problems revolve around excess verbosity, the near-term strategy is to disable screen reading of the movie until there is time to put better accessible logic into the movie (if that's even practical at all). You suggest a perfectly reasonable workaround for this near-term solution: provide a skip-Flash link. A slightly better technique that we would endorse is re-publishing the Flash movie as version 6, and simply turning off accessibility support for the whole movie (uncheck "Make Movie Accessible" in the Accessibility panel while nothing is selected on the Stage). This makes the screen reader ignore the Flash content entirely. Screen readers, for their part, would do well to include a feature that allows skipping past a section currently being read. This already appears in the form of, for example, next-paragraph key bindings. Perhaps a reasonable enhancement would be a skip-past-current-Flash-movie key binding. Also note that while some of the verbosity can come from the initial reading of a Flash movie, a lot can subsequently come from animation in the movie prodding the screen reader to re-read the page. Window-Eyes has included a key binding to help users deal with this: if they press Ctrl+Shift+F (I think - I might be misremembering the specific keys there), Flash events will stop being sent, turning the page into a static page that doesn't repeatedly start over from the top. Thanks again for your input. We hope that our next version of Flash will make enough improvements that everyone will be able to make their content accessible without undue effort. Deneb Meketa Flash Player engineering. > -----Original Message----- > From: Steve Vosloo [mailto:steve@usabilityjunction.com] > Sent: Wednesday, August 21, 2002 5:35 AM > To: dmeketa@macromedia.com > Subject: Inaccessibility of older Flash movies > > > Hi, > > I've been playing around with Windows-Eyes and Flash > 5 movies. Articles on the MM site say that with Flash Player 6 certain > elements of older Flash movies are made available to screen readers -- > and this is a good thing. But I'm afraid it's not. > > The problem is that because these older movies were not designed with > accessibility in mind, this "feature" can be more of a curse than a > blessing, trapping the user in a logically inaccessible movie. The > movies I'm looking at are quite complex and very interactive and I can > assure you it creates pure chaos for the blind user stumbling into the > movie. The worst part was that once I was in I couldn't tab out of the > animation. > > So I've recommended to my client to provide a text description of the > Flash movie and also a link to skip over it, e.g. > > Text description of Flash knee anatomy animation | Skip over Flash > animation > > [Movie goes here] > > I'm afraid MM still have not created a truly accessible Flash > environment (e.g. no drop-down lists yet). Until that happens we'll > have to provide a text description and a way around. > > Thanks > Steve > > Steve Vosloo > Division Manager > Usability Junction > > Tel: + 27 (0) 21 409 7961 > Fax: + 27 (0) 21 409 7050 > Cell: + 27 (0) 83 463 0012 > Web: www.usabilityjunction.com
Received on Thursday, 22 August 2002 03:23:56 UTC