Cara Quinn wrote:
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?
For the most part, it's reading the MSAA generated by the Flash plugins. (There's probably a bit more too it than that. MSAA is quite limited, so application developers often have to resort to odd uses of MSAA to communicate specialized functionality, which in turn requires screen reader developers to customize how they understand and use the MSAA representation.)
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?
Yep, stuff that should be possible to implement in a browser like Safari includes:
1. Detection of Flash objects. (It needs to be able to do this in order to hand them to the right plugin.)
2. Disabling and enabling Flash objects, wholesale, site-by-site, or even object-by-object.
3. Detection, and representation to the accessibility framework, of fallback content provided by publishers for people without Flash.
-- Benjamin Hawkes-Lewis
