Accessibility questions

tabbing thru flash & image sizes

[HelenDev]

After a rather gruelling meeting in which I realised that I don't always practice what I preach, I have decided to make my site more accessible ;)

I realise there are lots of different things I need to do to make this happen, but first off, I have a couple of questions...

1) If I try to tab through one of my pages, it gets stuck when it comes to some small flash graphics on the page. Is there a way to make them tab-through-able, or should I try to miss them out altogether? Can I use tabindex for this?

2) Should I always specify the height and width of an image?

Any thoughts or help on these would be much appreciated.

[hakre]

hi helendev!

to 1.)
using tabindex won't help you. in the moment flash (in correct the plugin or activex) will recieve the focus (input), it will remain there. flash then will handle tab on it's own and in it's own only.

but that's where you can jump in. edit your flash movie to catch the pressing of the tab-key and fire an fs_command back into the page. then use javascipt to position the focus on the next element in your global tab-order. the downside: works only when java and javascript is enabled (depends on what you think what accessibility should mean ;) ).

my opinion: your sites' accessibility encreases by not using flash at all.

to 2.):
using width and height attributes of img-tags for your images is really a good idea. your site will profit on that overall. the size of the page might grow in bytes (because there is more text in it), but the process of loading will be more linear for the user. that's because the browser can render your site with correct sizes without requesting all your images first. i think this will increase accessibility, too.

--hakre

[HelenDev]

Thanks Hakre.

Blimey, the flash one sounds a bit complex. One for a rainy day I think... You may well hear from me again on that one later!

I will start putting the image sizes in where I can.

On that subject, I have one page which is dynamically generated, it chooses one pic (a jpeg) from the db depending on the user's selection. These pictures are all different sizes (and I won't be making them all the same size). Is there anyway for php (or something else) to get the image dimensions each time?

Cheers,

Helen.

[tedster]

Yes, you can do that. Here's a thread in our PHP forum that get's into the topic:

[webmasterworld.com...]

[datadame]

May I ask a different question about accessibility here? (If this is the wrong forum, mods please move this as appropriate.)

Does anyone know for sure whether or not iframes can comply with Section 508's standards?

[HelenDev]

Cheers, Tedster. I will give that a shot later.

[DrDoc]

Does anyone know for sure whether or not iframes can comply with Section 508's standards?

Do frames?

[datadame]

My understanding is that frames can be coded to comply with 508, at least technically.

Having said that, I hasten to add that I avoid them like the plague, and encourage others to do the same, because of the problems they present to some screen-reader software.

Someone asked me about this the other day and I had to say I hadn't seen it addressed in 508. So I thought I'd ask here, to see whether anyone knows, or has any experience trying to use a screen-reader with an iframe, even one technically coded correctly. I'd be curious as to how well it worked or didn't work.