[cSUN 2003] minutes: accessible Flash MX authoring

中根です。

cSUNのセッションから、 accessible Flash MX authoring に関するものを聞
きながら適当にとったメモを流しておきます。

実は、ノートパソコンのキーボードがへたってきていて、かなり苦しみつつ書
いたこともありますし、英語力という潜在的な問題もあってかなりいいかげん
な内容になっていますので、同じセッションに出た方や、この件に詳しい方か
らの加筆修正は大歓迎です。

そもそも Flashを作ったこともなくて聞いているので、かなり誤解しているか
もしれません。少し時間ができたらまじめに学ぶ必要がありそうな気がしてき
ました。

中根雅文

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03/19/2003 14:50 PST

By default, flash tries to predict to determine the 
likely-tab/reading orders.  It gets harder as the movie/screen gets 
larger.

Often, some content is hidden in invisible area, where screen reader 
cannot determine what's visible.

banner ad can be annoying, just speaks same things over and over 
again.
This is due to constant changes on the screen, which is always sent 
to the MSAA data tree, which gets picked up by screen readers.

Tries to implement accessibility into gnome as soon as the API is completed.

captioning:

Many tools for flash support captioning.
Important to have also means to deliver captioning, such as flash 
communication server.

One example of caption done by magpie.

If there's slider to move the location in the video, and is used, 
the caption does not get updated.


text equiv for non-text element:

In flash mx, text equiv can be written for visual element.

One visual element can be made up of multiple pieces, but not all 
the pieces need text equiv.
It's the hardest to let designers understand what is good for text equiv.

In accessibility panel, one of the fields is, name and description, 
almost like alt and longdesc.  Screen readers don't distinguish 
between the two.


Deselect the option "make child element accessible."  That will make 
the text equiv of the entire group accessible.  This will stop 
constant repetition in some cases.


Make existing flash accessible:
1. Make everything silence first.

Use clors effectively.

Good contrast.

Don't make objects that don't ever stop moving.

Device independence:

frame based actions.  Old style coding can be buggy, and inaccessible.

Test the content both when screen reader is running and it's not.  
as the performance can be different.

When stuck in the flash content.  This is due to the ActiveX control 
within the IE.  Use some javascript and scripting inside flash to solve this.

Use only one piece of flash per page.  Sometimes, it's more useful 
to have separate window for flash content.

Expose structure and state:


Flash has no structure.
Use description wisely.

If you put the description on the top, it can be very disturbing as 
you have to listen to the same thing every time you visit the new 
page.  So create a site info page describing general layout and so 
on.

Put text labels to buttons and let the screen readers/users which 
button on the tool bar was pressed.


tab order:

In flash, tab and the reading order are the same thing.  Make the 
movie something small.  If it doesn't work, script the tab order.

If you do script of tab order, you need to put everything into the 
script.  So this is why modifying the existing flash movies is so 
hard.

You can't set tab order for static text, have to be dynamic text.  
For dynamic text, font info must be embedded, or will be  ugly.


for more info:
http://www.macromedia.com/accessibility
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