Cara Quinn wrote:
Actually this is something I was thinking about, and I wonder if it isn't really more of a Safari thing than a VO thing?... It seems as if Safari isn't making the flash content that it displays visible to VO?
No, the Adobe Flash player plugin for Safari does not make the Flash content visible to the Apple Accessibility API on which VoiceOver depends. Safari has little to do with it.
To a degree, it does involve the flash authors making the content accessible in the sense of properly labeling there content, but other than that, it still can be a function of Safari...
Playing Flash content can't easily be a function of Safari. The licence for the Flash format specification is open for anyone to read and make programs that generate Flash, but it is prohibited to use the specification for making programs that play Flash content. There is an open source project, Gnash, that attempts to reverse engineer how the Flash player works, but I think Apple easily damage their relationships with Adobe by adopting that in any form. Gnash is, in any case, a long way from feature parity with Adobe Flash Player, and does not implement any of its accessibility features. It's conceivable that with a lot of development work one could implement those features, Safari support, and VoiceOver support for Gnash.
But more realistically Apple has provided the tools Adobe needs to make accessible applications. It's now up to Adobe to use them.
-- Benjamin Hawkes-Lewis
