Skip to main content

WebAIM: Creating Accessible Flash Content

Popularity Report

Total Popularity Score: 0
Loading...
Loading...
Loading...
Loading...
Loading...
Loading...

Rank

Bookmark History

Saved by 11 people (-3 private), first by anonymouse user on 2007-06-15


Public Comment

on 2007-06-15 by christyinsdesign

Guidelines and ideas on how to make Flash content accessible. Includes examples and .fla files.

Public Sticky notes

  • Give users control over time sensitive content
  • Provide easy to use controls and navigation schemes
  • Be consistent
  • Use the clearest, simplest language appropriate to the content

    • Highlighted by jadeand

    Allow the Flash content to scale to a larger size

    Highlighted by jadeand

    By its very nature, Flash content does not lend itself to screen reader accessibility. Flash content is time-based and often changes over time. HTML content is more or less static. The static nature of HTML allows a screen reader to access the HTML content in a linear fashion. When a visual user accesses a Flash movie, he or she visually scans the contents of the movie and focuses directly on the important content or functionality. A screen reader user cannot "scan" through Flash content and can only access it in a linear manner and in the order the Flash developer has chosen to present it. Flash's timeline and programming language (ActionScript) allow constantly changing, dynamic, updating objects to animate, move, disappear, or duplicate themselves whenever the Flash developer chooses (or even randomly if they want). Because Flash content is usually constantly changing, this limits the ability of the screen reader to read the content in a sufficient or timely manner.

    Highlighted by jadeand

    There are three ways in which the Flash content can be made accessible to screen reader users:

    1. Make the Flash content natively accessible to the screen reader.
    2. Make the Flash content self-voicing, eliminating the need for the screen reader.
    3. Provide an accessible alternative to the Flash content.

    Highlighted by jadeand

    The key is to make the alternative content equivalent, not necessarily text-only. Instead of providing a text-only page with long running lengths of text, the equivalent should be a well-formatted and accessible web page with images, icons, paragraphs, and color. Just because someone accesses your equivalent alternative, doesn't mean that they are blind and don't care about what the page looks like or how it functions.

    Highlighted by jadeand