How to enable accessibility in Flex application

Question

The Accessibility best practices for Flex page from Adobe website list four strategies to enable accessibility :

• Enable accessibility by default for all Flex applications
• Enable accessibility in the Adobe Flex Builder™ 3 project properties
• Enable accessibility for an individual application
• Enable accessibility using the command-line compiler

I test if the accessibility is enabled by checking the value of Accessibility.active, which is always false in my sample application containing only a datagrid and some buttons, using the four above strategies.

As I'm new to Flex, I don't really know where else I could search to enable it, and no,

Accessibility.active = true;

isn't a solution, as it's a read-only property ;)

Thanks for your help.

Answer 1

In FlexBuilder, go to Project->Properties->Flex Compiler and then check the Generate accessible SWF file checkbox.

See this page for more details.

The Accessibility.active flag allows you to programmatically know if a user is using a screen reader. Adobe states that

Users who view your content must have Adobe® Flash® Player 9 or later, and Internet Explorer on Windows 2000 or Windows XP or later.

Source: http://livedocs.adobe.com/flex/3/html/help.html?content=accessible_5.html

For example, we used the Accessibility.active flag in our application to turn off certain graphical features (a calendar based schedule builder) and turn on a more accessibile version of that feature.

Hope that helps you get on your way to creating an accessible application!