That's great. Thanks for this.
Negoslav
----- Original Message -----
From: "Donald Marang" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: <[email protected]>
Sent: Sunday, October 19, 2008 3:31 AM
Subject: [Blind-Computing] Advances in Flash Acessibility
Adobe has recently released updates to their Creativity Suite 4 line of
products, which include Dreamweaver, Photoshop, Flash, and more. They claim
to have accessibility improvements in many of these products,but the Flash
improvements stood out to me as the most significant! I immediately thought
this is great, but it will take years before I notice any improvements in
popular sites. To my astonishment, I viewed a video on YouTube.com and the
interface is already very accessible and implements these features!
Hopefully, other sites update their websites quickly! I have yet to
understand how the volume and seek slider controls are moved with the arrow,
Home and End keys with JAWS as described. Below is a short description of
the enhancements:
Adobe Flash accessibility design guidelines
Accessible video controls
Adobe® Flash® CS4 Professional software provides industry-leading support
for accessible video. Providing captions for video solves accessibility
challenges for people who are deaf or hard-of-hearing, but people who are
blind or who have low vision or other physical disabilities need the video
playback controls to be keyboard accessible and to function properly with
assistive technologies such as screen readers and screen magnifiers. Flash
CS4 Professional offers improvements to the FLVPlayback video component that
make the default player controls accessible automatically, without any
coding required by the developer.
Simple implementation
All skins provided by Flash CS4 Professional support keyboard and screen
reader access, so developers simply insert the FLVPlayback component on the
stage in Flash - no configuration is needed.
Accessible interaction
Users who rely on keyboard access can utilize a variety of familiar
shortcuts to interact with the video controls. Buttons such as Play/Pause,
Stop, Rewind, Mute, and Closed Captions can be tabbed to and activated with
the spacebar key. Slider controls such as the volume and playhead position
controls can be accessed via the arrow keys, and the Home and End keys can
be used to go directly to the beginning or end of the range. The volume
slider also accepts numeric keys to set the playback audio levels in one
quick step.
Users who use screen readers will find appropriate names for the video
player controls that ensure that each control's purpose is clear. Some
controls require that the screen reader is in form interaction mode (which
is Forms mode in JAWS or Browse Off mode in Window-Eyes) because screen
readers often utilize arrow keys and other shortcuts for other purposes. For
example, many screen readers use right and left arrow keys to read
individual letters in text and control labels, so these keys are not
available outside of form interaction mode, as expected by users.
Don Marang
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Address for the list archives:
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For help from Mailman with your account Put the word help in the subject
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