Aral Balkan

By default, Flex Builder creates inaccessible SWF files.

Bad decision. This needs to change.

Enabling accessibility features for The GAE SWF Project resulted in an 8KB file size increase in the SWF file. I can live with that. Creating inaccessible SWF files to save a couple of KB is no savings at all.

The Flex accessibility overview page feels woefully outdated and mention Adobe Flash Player 7. We're on 9 now. Let's update these, guys!

It also reads more like marketing talk then factual information for developers with phrases like "designers and developers can create powerful, exciting, and engaging experiences on the web that are accessible to all" and "it's never been easier to design accessible Rich Internet Applications." Let's cut out the marketing talk and concentrate on the facts. If we feel that we need to dilute or detract from the facts with marketing talk, maybe we need to concentrate on changing the facts.

The Accessibility Best Practices for Flex document, on the other hand, does an admirable job of disseminating important information that is useful for developers.

It is also important to note that the accessibility features of the Flex components have been optimized for use with JAWS on Windows and that users will need to install additional JAWS scripts to enable these features. Why aren't these scripts included by default in JAWS?

The best practices document is very useful but I feel that we would benefit for a short, succinct and no bullshit summary to quickly inform developers on the state of accessibility in Flex. Something along the lines of:

The State of Accessibility in Flex

• Accessibility is not enabled by default for Flex applications (ideally with a note stating: "We will be changing this in the next release.")
• Accessibility in Flex is optimized for JAWS on Windows. (This is not necessarily a bad thing; better to have great support for one accessibility aid than shoddy support for several.)
• JAWS users will need to install additional scripts to take advantage of advanced accessibility features.
• Accessibility is more than adherence to standards and screen-reader support. For a full discussion, read Accessibility Best Practices for Flex.

Finally, bookmark the Accessibility Resource Center on Adobe.com and keep checking back for new articles (and bug Adobe if you don't see any!) :)

Comments

• Very true! I support accessibility! And finally, an Aral blog post that's not way over my head :-)

  by Sander on 2008-05-03 23:08:16

• The biggest problem with accessibility in Flash is that most developers don't care. Simply going through and enabling the Flex accessibility compiler option is only the first step. It bugs me when someone claims to have a 100% accessible app just because they turned on that checkbox. Things like keyboard only access, using higher contrast text, and not using color as the sole status indicator are all equally important. (There's longer lists, go check out cast.org or section508.gov) You really need to be thinking about these issues in the design stage of an application. Just yesterday I blogged about a design review that I had attended where a potentially bad accessibility design was presented. http://www.rogue-development.com/blog2/2008/05/03/keyboard-access-drag-and-drop/ Keyboard only access for an applications is probably the second biggest thing you could do to help people out, but the Flex API for setting up a simple tab ordering scheme sucks for everything except the most simple of applications. Oh, and AIR doesn't support screen readers? WTF?

  by Marc Hughes on 2008-05-05 12:46:02

• I raised this fairly recently with Matt Chotin. There is some talk of improving the accessibility of AIR for the next release. I am currently working for a large e-learning provider and accessibility is one of our conciderations for courseware 90% of which is done in Flash. There is a continum in most flash developers minds with enyjoyablity/features at one end and accessibility at the other, but this does not always need to be the case, it does however require careful design. There are however all sort of issues. There is no clear cross platform screen reader solution available that works on both Mac and PC that Air hook into, so its a patchy situation to say the least. Its is probably too much to ask for AIR to have its own screen reader

  by Stephen Buckley on 2008-05-06 16:35:11

• I'm suprised this post didn't catch my attention when you posted it. You may be aware of this already, but Adobe has just released draft documentation explaining how to create custom accessibility implementations for Flex components using the flash.accessibility.AccessibilityImplementation class, which has been undocumented until now. From my understanding, they've released the documents as a draft in order to solicit comments from the developer community, and I'm sure they'd be interested in your feedback if you have the time to offer it.

  by majordan on 2008-07-31 18:16:31

• I emailed Adobe well over a year ago about their outdated accessibilty documentation for Flex and was told they were going to update it. I also emailed Mozilla highlighting that you couldn't tab in and out of Flash content as you can in IE. Again, it was something they were aware of but seemingly haven't gotten round to fixing yet (not sure if it's fixed in Firefox 3). I think as long as the basics from a legal point of view are covered we're not going to see dramatic inroads into any of this. I'd love to be proved wrong. From what I've read on other sites, it sounds like SWFObject is going to be incorporated into Flash 10 as the default embed method. Adobe should go further and incorporate as much accessibility support as possible in all aspects of delivering Flash to the end user.

  by coderkind on 2008-05-09 10:14:22

• Nice Article, it's a shame accessability isn't a higher priority for adobe

  by Zapper on 2009-03-24 10:12:36

• I noticed the Beta version of Flex 4 has accessibility turned on by default. Somebody heard you.

  by Dave Sawyer on 2009-08-21 22:21:14

• Hi Aral, I wish to know few things related to flex. 1)Is it possible to create a fully accessible site using flex 3.2 2)How the additional scripts that needs to be installed,increase the accessibility of the app?? Waiting for your reply, Thanks in advance, Suresh.B

  by suresh on 2011-12-23 09:45:54