Accessibility

In Studio MX 2004, will the content of the 'Flash Player Settings' dialog box be accessible for users of screen readers?

At the moment none of the buttons are named, resulting in a lot of repetition of the word "Button".

Thanks,

Simon

Thanks for pointing this out.

This is a known issue and we are looking at ways to resolve it. At the moment, the current release includes these errors.

Cheers,
Bob

Hi bob,
First of all i would like to appreciate your effort on Accessibility.
Its good to see new Features of Accessibility in MX Studio.
I am developing accessible site in flash and facing some problems.As there is no list /forum so going to ask my questions here.Hope you dont mind that.
Screen Reader Cant read automatically the next Frame of flash movie.I have read all the Archives and found no solution.Please let me know How i can resolve this issue?
The other problem is regarding Drag & Drop Functionality.How I can make this Accessible?
Waiting for your Reply.

Bundle of Thanks.
Waqas

Hi Waqas,
there are answers that you can find in the archives as I think this is one of the most common issues that we all have.

I hope the structure of this blog can make it in such a way that users can see all the comment headers easily without the need to click on every comment in every month.

Also it would be very useful if there is someone replies to your comment or adding a new comment, an email with a direct link will be sent to you.

cheers
ks

Hi Bob thats great news on the tabbing issue as someone whos grappled with it for a few years now.
I was wondering if there has been an advances on the issue of making dynamic elements accessible. I remember discussing this with you previously. In mx when you create an object that has a role such as a button but it is an object that can be reused throughout an app with different functions. So a button say that gets its text from an xml file and does different things depending on what you want it to do. These kind of elements can not be made accessible in mx to a screenreader because they are dynamically generated. At present only very simple butons can be made accessible has there been any progress on this issue.
Best regards
Kieran Guckian

Hi.

I blogged an entry on this. You can find it here.

http://www.markme.com/accessibility/archives/002478.cfm

Let me know if you have questions!

Cheers,
Bob

It's great news that Flash will be able to tab back to the browser. Will we need to explicitly define the tabIndex or will it work with the default tabIndex? Will the things we've made in Flash 6 automatically have this functionality if viewed with the Flash 7+ plugin?

Hi Bob,

Good to hear that Macromedia is continuing to improve accessibility of Flash. Does the CSS support mean that text in Flash content (including button names) can be resized by using the standard browser controls and that a user can apply their own stylesheet to the flash content, if they want?

Also, what about compatibility with JAWS?

Cheers
Anthony

Hi.

First, there is not way to make a screen reader read anything within the Flash movie. This is perhaps the most common misconception Flash designers struggle with as they grapple with the particular challenges of accessibility.

Screen readers work best when working with a screen that is not moving. Elements that are moving over a series of frames should be hidden from the screen reader using the “Make Accessible” or the “make Child Objects Accessible” options on the accessibility panel. To change the contents of the screen, ensure that all buttons and other controls are accessible via the screen reader. Does this make sense?

Drag and Drop functionality is tricky since it relies on the use of the mouse. This is not to say it is not helpful for people with cognitive disabilities. It can be terrific. However, you’ll need to offer a redundant interface for folks that can not use the mouse. This could be through the use of checkboxes or combo boxes to create comparable functionality for other users.

Cheers,
Bob

The designer need not specify anything to allow the focus of the browser to move into and out of the Flash movie.

Cheers,
Bob

Hi Bob,
Can you please inform what is the max Length of Name and Description Field in the accessibility panel?

Thanx,
wk

As far as I know, there is no real limit to the size. however, I would keep name and descriptions values to about 50 characters for the sake of usability. Longer values will result in very verbose sites.

Cheers,
Bob

Regards tabbing out of Flash and back to the browser. Installed the player 7 public beta and ran some cross-browser tests. It worked fine with IE. But didn't work at all in NS, Opera, Mozilla. Are there plans to make it work the same cross browser or are minority players being ignored for this functionality. This would be a pity. The project I am currently working on requires similar functionality for NS and IE.

Hi Bob,
your "accessibility 3" shows the sample of active X trapped, I think it would be good if you can show the example of how to solve it too as I think people would like to know how you actually do it for flash player 6.

cheers
ks

Howdy,

To see more about how to handle the issue where a Flash movie traps focus prior to Flash Player 7, take a look at

http://www.sonokids.com/tabnew.html

Cheers,
Bob

At the moment, no we are not planning to implement a change to the other tools. Keyboard access limitations in Netscape on the whole and a lack of MSAA support have kept us focused on IE for the time being.

Cheers,
Bob

Hi there,

are there any plans to integrate a text-to-speech-feature in some future version of Flash? Do you know any text-to-speech-solution via actionscript for the current versions Flash MX or Flash MX 2004?

Kind regards,
Monika

Like a fine wine, we will release no product before its time :)

In other words, I can't talk specifically about future releases. That being said, we have no plans to add text to speech in Flash. The fact that the player is under 500 k would make it very difficult to do so.

At the same time, there is a really clever app that uses text to speech on the server side to generate speech in a Flash app. They push text through at&t natural voices using a perl script on the server and then stream the resulting mp3 to the flash client. It is very slick. See:

http://www.visionconnection.org/Content/Community/FamilyandFriendsCorner/WhaDoYouDoWhenYouMeetSomeoneWhoCantSee/default.htm

Necesito hacer que el texto que escriba lo hable el programa

Nececito convertir un texto a voz en ActionScript por favor ayudenmen