You rarely see the terms Flash and accessibility used together in a sentence, and yet the Flash Player has had the ability to integrate with assistive technologies for almost six years. In this session we'll dispell the myth that all Flash content is inaccessible, and show you how Flash can help to tackle accessibility issues that go beyond standard assistive technologies such as screen readers.

1. Flash &
Accessibility
Yahoo! Developer Summit
London, 2007

2. What is accessibility?

3. What is accessibility?
“making web sites accessible to
people with disabilities and at the
same time to people using different
operating systems, web browsers and
devices”

4. universality
What is accessibility?
“making web sites accessible to
people with disabilities and at the
same time to people using different
operating systems, web browsers and
devices”

5. What is accessibility?
“ensuring that people with disabilities
are not discriminated against”
Gez Lemon, October 2006

6. Types of disability

7. types of disability
Visual
Total blindness, partially sighted, colour blindness

8. types of disability
Visual
Total blindness, partially sighted, colour blindness
Auditory
Deaf or hard of hearing

9. types of disability
Visual
Total blindness, partially sighted, colour blindness
Auditory
Deaf or hard of hearing
Mobility
Limited movement and fine motor control

10. types of disability
Visual
Total blindness, partially sighted, colour blindness
Auditory
Deaf or hard of hearing
Mobility
Limited movement and fine motor control
Cognitive
Autism, ADHD, dyslexia, short-term memory loss

11. Flash & visual
disabilities

12. Flash & visual
disabilities
Assistive technologies
Flash hooks into MSAA on Windows
No support yet for other AT layers.

13. Flash & visual
disabilities
Assistive technologies
Flash hooks into MSAA on Windows
No support yet for other AT layers.
Zooming
Vector-based - native support for zooming.
Can hook into browser text resize with JS

14. Flash & visual
disabilities
Assistive technologies
Flash hooks into MSAA on Windows
No support yet for other AT layers.
Zooming
Vector-based - native support for zooming.
Can hook into browser text resize with JS
Colour adjustment
Flash 8 filters allow quick and easy colour
adjustment.

15. Had enough of
the slides yet?

16. Good!
It’s demo time

17. Flash & auditory
disabilities

18. Flash & auditory
disabilities
Graphical representation
Flash is graphical by nature.

19. Flash & auditory
disabilities
Graphical representation
Flash is graphical by nature.
Audio captioning
3rd party solutions for displaying external caption
data available for Flash 7+

20. Flash & auditory
disabilities
Graphical representation
Flash is graphical by nature.
Audio captioning
3rd party solutions for displaying external caption
data available for Flash 7+
Video captioning
Flash 8 supports reading in external caption data.
Latest Flash Player 9 supports 3GPP TimedText
embedded in MP4 file.

21. Another demo
3GPP TimedText

22. Flash & mobility
disabilities

23. Flash & mobility
disabilities
Keyboard control
Flash has built-in support for [TAB] key focussing.
Flash links [ENTER] and [SPACE] to mouse clicks.
Keyboard events are exposed in ActionScript.

24. Flash & cognitive
disabilities

25. Flash & cognitive
disabilities
No specific features
Flash doesn’t really have any specific features to
help with cognitive disabilities.
Rules that apply to standard web development
also apply to Flash.

26. One last demo
SITA Kids

27. Resources
Slides, examples, etc
http://dynamicflash.com/talks
Adobe
http://www.adobe.com/accessibility/products/flash/
Blogs
http://niquimerret.com
http://dynamicflash.com

28. Questions?

29. END