A couple of years ago I attended a seminar on Flash’s accessibility features put on by Macromedia. They were very proud of themselves but to be quite honest, it was laughable. To actually create an accessible site using Flash’s interface would be incredibly time consuming and full of workarounds and hacks. For example, assigning alt tags to all but the most basic graphics and animations is very time consuming. Also creating and managing tab indexes for every selectable element is a nightmare but actually, quite a necessary step since the built in algorithm for tabbing does not go in an intuitive order (thanks, Microsoft!)
Learning all of this, however, did help me to realize however some of the ways that Flash can be used to make an accessible site WITHOUT using the Accessibility package. Here are some points.
- There’s more to accessibility than blindness. You’re also designing for the colour blind, the hearing impaired, the elderly, people who cannot hold a mouse steady, people with learning disabilities, &c.
- Make text large and readable. Make buttons large and clickable.
- Provide keyboard shortcuts to common tasks. Allow users to navigate using the keyboard and assign tab orders where appropriate.
- Avoid using colour to provide contrast in your designs (ie. red text on green background). To check this, turn the saturation all the way down on your monitor.
- Take advantage of Flash’s multimedia abilities to display both audio content and visual content (including subtitles)
- Make it in XHTML. No seriously. If possible put the entire contents of the site in XHTML which is easily handled by screen readers. If you still need Flash, hide the flat version with CSS and scrape the XHTML for data!
- Test your work on Lynx or better, turn on your screen reader! A lot of the tricks for determining search engine visibility apply to screen readers.
A lot of this just comes down to good design that doesn’t get in the way of the content making it as easy to access as possible.
Here is another article on accessibility (css) which claims to go beyond the W3G’s guidelines. -Found on CSS Beauty [.com]