FLASH (SWF) as headers?

[burntToast]

Not really sure if this is the right place for this post but since I could not find a better place I ask here, it is somewhat related to webstandards at least. Now to my question... Lately I've been noticing that more and more sites, which promote themselves as beeing standards compliant and accessible sites, use flash for their text headers. I can see some obvious reasons for this such as getting complete font control, and nicer looking headers. However, from an accessibility point of view, is this a good approach? Since a user is unable to scale the font size and/or change the color of the header should he/she desire a high contrast layout. Furthermore, what does the search engines think about this method. Apparently they seem to like neatly structured sites with list, paragraphs, headers and so on, is it just as good with flash headers? Are there any other than the advantages I already mentioned to using flash for headers?

[Setek]

I think what you are referring to is sIFR, or Scalable Inman Flash Replacement [mikeindustries.com] technology.

The good news is yes, it is fully accessible, because it merely runs a replace on already existing tags within your document (e.g. div#content h4) with full specificity abilities.

The W3C have recommended it as a viable solution to wanting specific, anti-aliased text. While seemingly unaffected by browser text size, it actually is - however, controlled by javascript, a refresh is required. Which is fine for actual accessibility, seeing as such people would by default have their text size at a larger setting (thus, the h4 would be at a larger size -before- being replaced, and would replace -at that- larger size.)

It also degrades beautifully - without javascript enabled, or flash enabled, the normal h4s will display with your existing CSS.

[burntToast]

yes that was what I was refering to, and that was great news to me. Thanks for enlightening me!