2008-08-19
In Accessibility ,Actionscript 2 ,Actionscript 3 ,Flash ,Flex / Tags: /
Often I get asked for samples of accessible Flash sites. There are one or two well known Flash sites that are accessible like JK Rowling and the work of Thea Eaton from Snert Studios. There is also a list of fairly outdated links on Adobe’s site.
I am sure there are people out there who put in a lot of work to make their work accessible. If you have done so please leave a comment with a link to your accessible Flash site and feel free to give tips or comments on anything that was a little out of the ordinary.
9 ResponsesLeave a comment ?
Prediction: Zero substantive responses. Flash accessibility just is not practised in the real world.
I hope that I do get some good responses.
Some older work for Houghton Mifflin. A few other examples are on Adobe’s site:
Word SortWord sorting game features keyboard accessible click and drag and screen reader accessibility. Scalable viewport.
Word BuilderSpelling game features robust keyboard accessiblility. Screenreader accessibility is there, but the game play is really geared to visual pattern matching. Scalable viewport.
More recent examples from Modernista!:
HUMMER InternationalThe localized version of HUMMER International supported multiple languages and was for the most part keyboard and screen reader accessible.
Hearts On FireFor the most part, keyboard and screen reader accessible. Hypertext links in dynamic text fields are keyboard and screen reader accessible. Video uses the captioned FLVPlayback component skins. Supports deep-linking and is search engine optimized.
The Flash projects with the most attention to accessibility I’ve ever worked on are sadly not online anymore: All the games/activities for BBC Jam were fully ‘voice-overed’ in English, Welsh and Gaelic, had configurable subtitles and text sizes, and were keyboard accessible wherever humanly possible.
That meant for example that we created two primary school drag and drop games which could be played entirely with just the keyboard. Not pretty with the yellow tab boxes, but playable.
Also meant that we had to endure listening to an animated welsh-speaking monkey for longer than I’d care to remember, but that’s beside the point…
Adding a quick few examples:
http://www.kingtut.org – has an accessible navigation in Flash.
http://ssa.gov/pgm/flash/overviewcaptioned.htm – the US Social Security Adminstration used Flash to offer an accessible video UI.
http://www.amitgupta.info/e41st/ – this is a Flex exampole that is of interest not because it is an ideal example – it in fact has a couple of critcal issues, but because the developer spent almost no time making improvements for accessibility. The issues that do remain are a result of the use of custom controls and will hopefully be addressed also.
One more example that I wanted to point out – another Flex example: http://www.mlc.com.au/InsuranceGapCalculator/
We’ve done a few at Nomensa, a couple of games:
http://www.nomensa.com/christmas_game/
http://rnibblinddate.nomensa.com/ (this one is quite old now, and could do with some work from a hard of hearing point of view.)
A dynamic ‘carousel’:
http://www.defacto-cms.com/about-defacto/case-studies.html
An interactive map
http://myftbihome.co.uk/property-search/map.html
A presentation type thing:
http://www.nomensa.com/
The BBC Merlin website features a number of accessibility features including:
Heirarchical tabbing: Elements containing multiple links/buttons are grouped into an individual tabbable elements until selected (main nav, sub nav, media carousel, video player etc) .
Layered tabbing: When viewing certain content such as an image gallery focus is set to the overlayed (lightbox style) gallery. Tabbing through the partially hidden content below is disabled until the overlayed content is closed.
Audio Descriptions: All content has associated audio descriptions voiced by one of the shows actors (Richard Wilson).
Movement lock: Allows users to disable animation (transitions, rollovers etc) for users sensitive.
SWFAddress: Facilitating deeplinking and support for browser forward/back buttons.
It was a lot of work to implement these features, especially in a fully dynamic site, but feels worth the increased development time.
Personally if I had to make a screen-reader accessibly website/program I simply would not choose flash as a technology.
However I can see the advantage of making accessible flash animations/interactions for within a mainly HTML site and at that level it works quite well.