Accessibility Praise For Flash

People With Dissabilities Can "view" Flash

[knighty]

"Community organizations including the American Association of People With Disabilities, the WGBH National Center for Accessible Media, the National Federation of the Blind and activists like Mike Paciello, author of the first book on web accessibility, are all supportive of the new accessibility features in Macromedia Flash."

[macromedia.com...]

[Eric_Jarvis]

yep

it's getting there...I'm not a fan of much of what has been produced with it as yet, but I'm beginning to see genuine uses for Flash

[knighty]

Who knows maybe by Flash 10 it will be viewed completley differently than it is today :)

[papabaer]

A nice start but very limited. I am going to see if I can find the article, but if I recall, the new "accessibility" is only supported by a single propriety browser. Of course, in any event, this IS still a start.

[papabaer]

Yep... propriety stuff (but still something):
[macromedia.com...]

MSAA (Microsft Active Accessibility) and the Windows-Eyes Screen reader. The real question is: are the designers who are naturally "flash-focused" going to give up all of their core design techniques for accessibilitie's sake?

Consider Macromedia's own recommendations.

[macromedia.com...]

They state that designers should "avoid animating text, buttons, and input text fields... avoid the use of looping movies."

Uh... yeah!
That's why I prefer coding standard HTML! ;)

Good resource for those considering coding for accessibility: University of Toronto/Screen Readers - [utoronto.ca...]