Accessibility

Except that Ajax folks are building on skills they already have, Flash requires you to learn something new _and_ you have to pay for the pleasure. I am more interested in the mix and match of the techniques that sIFR offers where you can have Flash but you have a nice text alternative layer below it.

Not true, Jesse. Ajax requires new skills as well, when you can get it to work at all.

Sifr is an interesting approach, but it does not deal with dynamic content at all. The real challenge is building Rich Internet Apps that are accessible to all.

At a minimum, we need to see better practice on keyboard access, labels and AT interoperability.

To be fair, across the board, there is a real challenge with the single screen model of the RIA and the screen reader that will affect Flash, AJAX and other technologies down the road. How do we account for a change on one part of the screen updating other content on another part? How do we consistently let users know what a control is or does when developers have a nasty habit of constantly using custom controls? These are challenges that Flash has been grappling with for a while. AJAX still has to address more basic issues such as keyboard access and screen reader support.

Cheers,
Bob

"Not true, Jesse. Ajax requires new skills as well, when you can get it to work at all."

What? You aren't being serious are you?

"Sifr is an interesting approach, but it does not deal with dynamic content at all. The real challenge is building Rich Internet Apps that are accessible to all."

I think sIFR demonstrates that you can use JS to make use of flash outside of the cheesy games. You could use JS it to enhance your 'Rich Internet App' - but would it be more or less 'Rich' than what Basecamp demonstrates? Or Inman's new AJAX toy - Mint. That looks just as good as any Flash presentation of server stats, not sure how accessible it is.

"At a minimum, we need to see better practice on keyboard access, labels and AT interoperability."

Yup.

"AJAX still has to address more basic issues such as keyboard access and screen reader support."

What AJAX are you talking about? Sure it is hard to figure out what JAWS does with new content when the browser doesn't refresh the page to receive/display new information but all the content is in a simple form that can easily be used to provide an alternate content site for users with adaptive technology.

Flash could make it easier by working with the adaptive technology venders to provide an accessible plug-in that would assist the developer in making content more accessible. AJAX can't and will likely have a harder time with adaptive technology venders than Flash... but who knows?

Two conferences will be dedicated to Flash, Ajax and accessibility during the Webdesign International Festival (France, February 2&3rd 2006). Bob, Andrew, would you be interested in coming and visit us?!!

Thanks for pointing that out, it is easy to forget that when we develpo, that we know what changes we ae looking for, and sometimes it is easy to forget that someone who is unfamiliar with our site navigation practices, using an 800 x 600 screen may miss exactly what we are trying to point out to them.
It is often a dumbfounding event to watch someone else unfamiliar with our site to surf through it, and miss the meat of the info!
Perhaps some loose standards will be followed and ajax styled flash navigation will become more intuitive for surfers in the future and it won't be as big of a deal.

I will be in France during that time visiting family would love to attend those two confrences Delphine can you send me some info?

This is kind of an old post on which to comment, but here are my two cents.

Developing accessible Flash does build on skills you already know because ActionScript is based on ECMA Script. If you know enough JavaScript to pull things off with AJAX, you can easily develop in Flash ActionScript. Heck, that's how I wound up doing what I do. (I even used to describe myself to collegues as the "Flash-hating Flash guy.")

Following is a URL for an accessible Flash feature on which I worked that demonstrates capabilities of Flash accessibility that I don't believe to be possible with AJAX/DHTML at this time.

http://www.eduplace.com/kids/sv/books/content/wordsort/

It's a click-and-drag sorting game that is keyboard and screen reader accessible.

With Flash, you can dynamically control what is silent and what is voiced by the screen reader. When a screen reader user selects a word to sort, we silence all objects on the stage except for those objects directly relevant to the sorting task (the selected word, the active sorting category bins, and the words which have already been sorted into the active sorting category bins). This is similar to the concept of progressive disclosure that Bob mentioned in his earlier posts regarding the accessible version of jkrowling.com. To acheive the same effect in AJAX/DHTML, you'd have to set the display CSS property of the objects you wish to be silent to display:none, which isn't really the same.

I believe this is the kind of challenge about which Andrew is speaking in this post.

I think Flash has its attractions and great uses for accessibility, however, it cannot be considered a replacement for AJAX.
I suggest those interested to have a look at DHTML Accessibility framework,
http://www.mozilla.org/access/dhtml
which so far is the only viable solution to resolving accessibility-related challenges that dynamic content poses. In order for this technology to work properly, both leading screen readers already provide varying level of support and I am hoping that we will see more of it.
Watch out for related presentations during the upcoming CSUN conference, http://www.csun.edu/cod.