Flash, browsers, OSes & accessibility

aka things I learnt this week part 2

I am cur­rently read­ing Web Access­ib­il­ity: Web Stand­ards and Reg­u­lat­ory Com­pli­ance and I am learn­ing a few inter­est­ing things. I have been select­ively read­ing chapters, the chapter I have found most inter­est­ing so far is Access­ible Flash. Which says for flash to be access­ible to a screen reader, the user must have:

1. Win­dows 98, 2000 or XP;
2. Inter­net Explorer 5 or better;
3. A recent ver­sion of one of five screen reader soft packages,
4. Flash plu­gin ver­sion 6 or better;

Any other OS or another browser and flash is not access­ible to a screen reader. It has to do with the Microsoft Act­ive Access­ib­il­ity (MSAA) API. MSAA works very well with Microsoft products and this is what Flash uses to make con­tent access­ible to screen read­ers. Fire­fox does not work as effect­ively as IE with MSAA, how­ever, Moz­illa have been work­ing hard to make Fire­fox access­ible to screen read­ers via MSAA and it does with both JAWS and Win­dows Eyes screen read­ing soft­ware (with some lim­it­a­tions). Adobe has yet to come to the party, Flash only talks to MSAA via IE not FF.

I do not know how much work Adobe have done with the Apple API used for Voice Over built into Tiger or the Linux screen reader API, but at the moment Flash is only access­ible to screen read­ers that meet cer­tain specifications.

Even if you have the hard­ware and soft­ware required, Flash is still not access­ible unless the cre­at­ors of the movie know how to make it access­ible and then took the time to make it access­ible. Even though I am a fan of Flash for some tasks, I will use HTML over Flash for access­ible con­tent, because it is quicker for me and does not place restric­tions on the end user

This entry was posted on Sunday, November 5th, 2006 at 2:39 pm and is filed under accessibilty . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.