making Flash accessible to screen readers

need help making Flash accessible to screen readers

[think_tank]

Ok. I'm making a website that serves up MP3s to users in a fairly straightforward manner. I'm delivering them by linking to the sound files directly. I also want people to be able to play these files without having to open up a media player, so I've used an inbuilt flash player wherever the files are that calls the MP3 with the Flashvars function (I'm not getting too technical here as I'm not a Flash coder and I'm using someone else's script).

The main problem that I'm running into at the moment is that I would like to make my Flash Player accessible to people who are using screen readers, like JAWs. When I check the 'make movie accessible' panel in MX, and assign tab orders to my various buttons, the flash movie is accessible via keystrokes if you're just using your browser, but if you turn JAWS on the flash becomes inaccessible. The screen reader recognises the Flash Object, and reads out what I've put in the elements, but will not let me tab between them. I'm assuming this is some kind of conflict with the TAB key commands in explorer not being the same as the TAB key commands in JAWS. Is there a way (with Flash) that I can get around this? Do I need to assign keystrokes to each button in my Flash movie? (and if so, how? the Help section in Flash was quite vague about this).

I would love to hear from anyone who has used Flash in an accessible way, especially with JAWS or any other screen reader.

what macromedia says [macromedia.com]

[BlobFisk]

I think that the penetration of assistive technologies that support Flash accessibility is far too small to assume accessibility compliance.