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Making Flash Accessible

Posted: March 4, 2008
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Author: Paul Rowe
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Filed under: accessibility, flash
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Tags: Flash accessibility

There is always the fear that advances in web technologies, especially proprietary ones, will result in a web that is less accessible. However this is not always the case, and there is a real impetus within current web trends to develop according to standards and best practices. Nowhere is this more evident than the advances in Flash content. Since Macromedia’s (now Adobe) MX version Flash has included an Accessibility panel which has allowed developers to optimize their flash content to be: read by screen readers, operated through means other than a mouse and accessed by the largest number of user system versions/specifications. More generally this will also make your actionscript more extensible meaning that it can be reused and duplicated with greater ease. Some of the key things to remember for developers and is to:

Make child objects accessible - This can be checked in the accessibility panel, but it is also good practice to keep code in one place and try not to hide elements within each other i.e. try not to attach code within movie clips, call them from the main root timeline
Name and provide descriptions - always give elements and objects names that is indicative of their content
Specify variable/array types - defining string, numerical, text is another good habit to get into
Make use of the shortcut feature in the accessibility panel - this provides keyboard shortcuts to specified objects
Caption/subtitle video and animated content - there are many free tools for achieving this such as MAGpie

While Adobe has made a real commitment to incorporating accessibility tools within its software there is still much to be done in the area. With this in mind I should point out that it is worth considering SVG as an alternative to SWF (It can be converted) as this is based on XML for its structure which makes it a friend of the W3C. Obviously this is a much bigger issue than i can cover here. Ive provided some links to some useful sources:

web aim resource for accessible Flash
usability.com article
Adobe Accessibility centre