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best way to communicate with screenreader sw

[benihana]

Ive been asked to look at a page featuring flash with regards to accessibility.

Basically its an HTML page with a flash movie that recreates some of the HTML navigation in a way that only flash can. In terms of usability the movie is really redundant, but it looks nice and the client likes it.

I just want to be able to communicate to screen readers etc that the flash movie simply recreates navigation that is available elsewhere on the page.

My idea is to put a single pixel gif wrapped in a href to act as a skip to navigation link that jumps to the html nav, and giving it s title along the lines of "the following flash movie replicates the main navigation. follow this link to skip to the html version"

any thoughts?

cheers

[zackattack]

Hi
I am not sure what version of Flash you are using, but there is the ability to add Descriptive Text and names to the entire movie and or individual elements of your movie which can be read by a screen reader.

There is allot of help in Flash itself in the help section about Accessibility. I beleive this is in both MX and MX 2004 (I am using the latter)

Menu nav is: Window > Other Panels > Accessibility

To quickly make your entire movie 'Readable' by screen readers
If you make sure you have no objects selected and view this Accessibility Panel, it should give you the option to 'Make the movie Accessible' (which all movies are by default) and to DE-SELECT 'Make child objects accessible' and DE-SELECT 'Auto Label' Then enter a name and Description - in theory when your screen reader comes accross the flash movie the name and description will be read by the screen reader, I say in theory because I have not tested it out yet...

I hope it works - do let me know if it does work as I dont have access to a screen reader to test it myslef.

You will be able to publish this in Player 6 or 7

So it may not answer your question fully, but these are some of my thoughts.. I would add a link underneath the flash movie which clearly states it is a link to the HTML version of the same menu, rather than attaching it to sigle gif - this also shows clearly you are conscious about accessibility

hope this is ok

ZA

[benihana]

thanks for the input, but unfortunately i dont have access to the orignal .fla, so im trying to work round it in other ways
cheers