Flash and ADA compliancy

Question

Has anyone here created a Flash site or application that is ADA (Section 508) compliant? What features did your site/application support?

One example is creating forms in Flash. The standards say that "When electronic forms are used, the form shall allow people using Assistive Technology to access the information, field elements, and functionality required for completion and submission of the form, including all directions and cues."

Does Flash allow this?

I guess you can build in your own tabbing and triggering voiceovers and such. Just wanted to get a sense of what people have done to tackle this issue.

Answer 1

I have never done such a thing, probably because all of the applications I have created with flash so far were far to visual to work with screen readers (apps such as games, promotion sites, video delivery apps, visual editors for all kinds of products).

flash player basically provides this functionality with the flash.accessibilty package.

now the question is, why do you use flash in the first place? if it is only for creating forms and such, you might just as well stick to HTML. flash has been designed to be good at displaying and animating vector graphics and doing other visual things, that unfortunately cannot be made accessible to blind people.

if you do want to use flash for form base applications that are at the same time accessible, I suggest you use a GUI framework that has accessibility already built-in, such as Flex. It is impossible for flash to capture the semantics of an arbitrary app wildly composed of a jungle of animated displayobjects, but in a framework, this is possible.

hope that helps

greetz

back2dos