Week 14

Making the Flash movie accessible

O.K so now I have an audio console using Flash that more or less works with the latest Flash player [r40]. In week 12 I added buttons to control the audio.

Pressing the play buttons starts the narration. Pressing the stop button stops the narration etc. I also added keystrokes to play, rewind, fast-forward and stop.

The buttons are quite obvious to a sighted user but "What if someone cannot see the player to click on it?"
"How does a visually impaired person bring focus to the flash player in the first place?"

The answer is the tab key. Visually impaired users hit tab key to go to the next link. Shift + tab goes to the previous link. FlashMX has useability features that allow labels to be added to buttons etc. On the play button you could add "play", "this button play the narration".The idea is that Screen readers can read the labels aloud.

The big issue for accessibility is escaping the movie. Once focus is drawn to a Flash movie there is no way to exit the movie with the tab key, you’re trapped inside. The only way to escape would be to force the browser to refresh, or go back to the previous page.

The solution is to add a javascript link to a button in flash that draws focus to an element outside the Flash movie. From there uses can tab to the next link.

This is the solution that Greg Giannis helped me come up with. On a flash button use the handler getURL to direct the page an HTML element.

In this case the "exit" button calls the quitConsole() function. The audio stops and the focus is pulled to a button under the flash movie.

function quitConsole () {
mySound.stop();
playing = false;
getURL("javascript:document.form1.skip.focus()");
}

The button is called "skip" and it sits inside a form called "form1". So the full DOM address is "document.form1.skip"; focus() is what you want the browser to do. Literally draw focus.

It seemed that only focus only worked on form elements.

I also added a "skip narration" link so the user could chose to avoid the Flash movie. When the link is click the focus is drawn to the button below the flash movie.

week 15