Making an Interactive Flash movie Accessible

Accessible slider elements in flash

[RichB]

Sorry if this is in the wrong forum - let me know if I should post it somewhere else!

I've got a Flash movie that I'm trying to make accessible...
I know this is very difficult, if not impossible, but there is no animation in the movie, and most of it is text.

The movie is a questionnaire, containing several text items, each accompanied by a button and a slider...
getting everything apart from the slider accessible seems to be achievable.
The main problem we're facing is getting a slider to make sense via a screen reader.

I've only just started looking into this, but it's not all that easy to find information on this subject.
The questions that I'm currently looking into:

1) Could a screen reader read a slider position?

2) Will moving the slider cause the screen reader to start again from the beginning of the movie? (from what i've seen so far i'm guessing this might be the case)

3) If we replace the slider with a set of radio buttons, will selecting between these cause the screen reader to start from beginning?

We're using Studio MX (not 2004) to create the movie.
Any ideas, or pointers where to look for more information would be much appreciated,

Thanks,

Richard

[BlobFisk]

I apologise in advance - I'm not answering your question, merely add more questions!

Flash, to date, was inherently inaccessible. I read that the latest release of Flash throws some modicum of energy into accessibility - but is there support among existing screen readers? Do the users (of screen readers) need to install a plug-in?

Is an SWF made with Studio MX automatically accessible, or does the developer need to add the accessibility support?

[RichB]

From what i've found out so far, Studio MX was the first version to provide any kind of basic accessibility functionality, mainly by making it easier to add text equivalents to movie items.

This is by no means automatic, but at least can be done, although is a long way from making flash helpfully accessibile.

Macromedia have just released MX2004 which presumably will further develop the accessibility support. I haven't really looked into this, as I know we won't be upgrading for a while! Macromedia have apparantly been consulting with Jakob Nielsen (usability/accessibility guru), so they might well have come up with something useful.

I've only started looking at the microsoft, and JAWS readers, but where the text equivalents are available, i think they'll read them ok without requiring any extra plug-ins etc.