RE: jQuery events , ufo and screenreaders

Well, to be accurate, the player doesn't assume anything.  The player marks the "active" property of the accessibility object as being set to true and doesn't (and can't) differentiate between any use of the MSAA interface, whether it is a screen reader or not. A developer may choose to establish this assumption.

To describe the Flash Player as capable of assistive technology detection is a shorthand that we and others have used in describing this functionality.  And it is accurate in that the player can detect when a screen reader is in use, just not without some potential false positives.

Thanks,
AWK

Andrew Kirkpatrick
Group Product Manager, Accessibility
Adobe Systems 

akirkpat@adobe.com
http://twitter.com/awkawk
http://blogs.adobe.com/accessibility


-----Original Message-----
From: w3c-wai-ig-request@w3.org [mailto:w3c-wai-ig-request@w3.org] On Behalf Of Jonathan Avila
Sent: Friday, March 11, 2011 10:55 PM
To: Gavin Thomas; ng@tjkdesign.com; w3c-wai-ig@w3.org
Subject: RE: jQuery events , ufo and screenreaders

Yes, the Flash Player watches for the wm_getObject messages.  If those
messages are requested from the player it assumes it's assistive
technology making those requests.

This could indicate other technologies and not just screen readers though
-- for example an OS based speech recognition package.  Dragon does not
seem to send these at the Flash Player currently although it supports MSAA
in other applications.

Jonathan

-----Original Message-----
From: Gavin Thomas [mailto:Gavin.Thomas@uwe.ac.uk]
Sent: Wednesday, March 09, 2011 9:51 AM
To: Jonathan Avila; ng@tjkdesign.com; w3c-wai-ig@w3.org
Subject: RE: jQuery events , ufo and screenreaders

> One solution that I recommend is to either detect the presence of the
screen reader

I didn't realise there was a way to detect the presence of a screenreader
as it's sits on top of a browser?



-----Original Message-----
From: w3c-wai-ig-request@w3.org [mailto:w3c-wai-ig-request@w3.org] On
Behalf Of Jonathan Avila
Sent: 09 March 2011 13:17
To: ng@tjkdesign.com; w3c-wai-ig@w3.org
Subject: RE: jQuery events , ufo and screenreaders

Thierry wrote:
> The problem is that many authors use "transparent" or "opaque",
> because
they do not want the object to hide other elements on the page (i.e. drop
down menus).

Yes, I'm well aware the issue.  Unfortunately there is no immediately
solution in order for the Flash to expose accessibility information.  JAWS
12 changes the wmode dynamically when JAWS is running and it sets it to
"window" but as you know that can have a dramatic effect.

One solution that I recommend is to either detect the presence of the
screen reader or offer an accessibility option which renders the same page
with wmode set different.  This would mean that in accessiblity mode
content would need to be position different so it didn't appear cut-off
behind the Flash movie but allows for different users to access the same
content.  For example, a drop down menu that normally would appear over
the Flash content would appear horizontally above it and push the Flash
content down.

> I came up with a technique that allows dynamic resizing of videos.
> This
means that if the container is set in EMs, the video can increase/decrease
its size (keeping the same aspect ratio) in relation to the user's
text-size settings.

Yes, sounds very nice.  I've played around with this technique for Flash
content in general (non-video) by watching the size of the other content
change and using the external interface to resize the Flash content. Flash
is nice in that regards compared to Flex that it allows for this type of
resizing quickly and also allows for zooming based on the IE zoom
settings.

Jonathan

Received on Saturday, 12 March 2011 04:29:40 UTC