For a designer or software developer the appeal of flash content is compelling. It provides a strong interactive capability to deliver engaging media over the internet consistently across all browsers which have the flash player plugin installed. The speed and visual nature of the authoring tools make is quick and easy to work with. However the same problems crops up time and time again: that of your client wishing to provide accessibility, for me this usually entails complying with the W3C AA guidelines.
If we consider the accessibility specifications and tools available it is quickly apparent that flash is lacking in this regard. Understood the paper work is in order from both Adobe, the browser manufacturers and main assistive software providers. But have you actually tried it?
In this 2 part series I will comment on first hand experience developing solutions to provide accessible flash and contrast this against the information available from webAim who have taken great care to survey validated users on their use of flash websites.
Finally I will provide some bold recommendations on how to navigate this difficult field to improve the user experience for all concerned. Please don’t take my approach as correct it stems from years putting large amounts of content together and trying to meet clients opposing requirements.
Screen Design & Presentation
Lets start by considering the quick, obvious and beneficial to all wins: Organise your screen design so that the layout is easy on the eye, visual ques and information is well positioned, logical and correctly marked up.
Flash: Strong Support
How: By organising the materials on screen in a clear, consistent and meaningful way is easy in even the oldest of flash players. Careful selection of colour palettes is essential and avoiding the use of text on graduated backgrounds is good practice. Other requirements including ensuring that any content presented to users is not time bound, this ensures that those who need longer to read are not disadvantage.
Oh and please please no blinking, moving, animated text.
Scaling
With more recent version of flash comes the introduction of scalable vectors graphics support. This allows content to be scaled to any size without loss of any quality. For those requiring accessibility options taking advantage of this feature is desirable. Unlike providing text only resizing controls the entire flash content is resized. This approach ensures that the use of scroll bars, text overruns, pagination are avoided.
The Timeline
Flash operates very differently to traditional web development. HTML is largely static and has no support without complex programming to support a timeline. A timeline allows content, actions and experiences to be triggered in response to a time event occurring.
As a result this can provide engaging content however it can also severely limit the accessibility capability.
So what to do…
Consider the impact your timeline events will have on users who may need longer to take in the content. Perhaps the use of a pause, rewind/replay controls will provide all that is required to ensure that the widest range of users can access the content.
In the next session I’ll continue the discussion and look at keyboard accessibility, closing down of the ‘open web’, navigation and interactions. Also included will be the use of video and audio and how to handle screen readers and where there may be the case for alternative formats such as separate accessible formats such as a essay document.
