Benjamin, thanks very much for the clarification. It makes perfect
sense. so in the case of JFW, then, per se, what is it doing that
allows it to grant access to flash content (however limited) on the web?
To bring this back 'round to Mac with VO, would it be at least
possible for VO to have access via Safari's DOM that a flash element
even exists on a page?... I'm assuming at least this much could be a
browser function?... Or have I got it wrong?...
Thanks so much for your explanation....
Have an awesome evening!...
Smiles,
Cara :)
On Jan 13, 2008, at 4:18 PM, Benjamin Hawkes-Lewis wrote:
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
---
View my Online Portfolio at:
http://www.onemodelplace.com/CaraQuinn
