Greg Kearney wrote:
Got this back from Adobe. Not sure how to reply perhaps the user
community could give Mr. Kirkpatrick an education.
It's problematic. I've long argued that Adobe Flash Player should
support the Apple Accessibility API and recently filed a bug to that effect:
http://bugs.adobe.com/jira/browse/FP-38
The VoiceOver compatibility database testifies to the fact that
VoiceOver does, in fact, allow access to many applications. The office
suites of both Apple and Microsoft stand out as critical accessibility
failures, but this is partially offset by the accessibility of Bean,
Tables, and more dramatically OpenOffice.org. It may well be Andrew
isn't even aware of the later.
Despite the improvements that came with Leopard (such as navigation by
heading), Andrew is on safer ground in arguing that "access to HTML
content with VO is hardly mature". Maturity is a somewhat subjective
concept, but I guess the decisive comparison is with JAWS and Internet
Explorer. With VoiceOver and Safari, the navigation order in HTML
documents remains pseudo-random, there are important missing commands
(like "Read from Here to End"), data tables are treated as meaningless
layout boxes rather than as meaningful column-row relationships, and
VoiceOver users themselves often express frustration about the state of
affairs. I guess on this point it's partly up to VoiceOver users
yourselves to push back against Apple to demand improvements to achieve
parity with Windows web accessibility and to Adobe if you feel that
"access to HTML" is mature enough that you don't feel the need to resort
to a virtual machine.
A first line of counter-argument is that not having access to Flash
content and functionality is much worse than the remaining problems with
VoiceOver and HTML. I'm not sure if this is really true or not, but it's
perhaps arguable. I know my company's websites sometimes use Flash
modules for navigation. While we try to provide fallbacks for users with
Flash disabled, that doesn't help if you have Flash enabled but are also
on a platform where Flash does not support the accessibility API.
Another place where Flash accessibility support is important is for
controls for audio and video players. I think those are a strong
contender to be even more important than table accessibility, although
developers often fail to use the Flash accessibility featureset or
render it void on Windows by layering HTML content over the player
(which disrupts access via MSAA).
I wonder how many VoiceOver users also use FireVox, and whether its
existence is anything of a second counter-argument to Andrew's point
here. FireVox can use Leopard TTS. Can you have both FireVox and
VoiceOver switched on at the same time? If so, then the Flash plugin
could (very theoretically) be used with VoiceOver even as Firefox was
self-voicing itself.
A third line of counter-argument is to pitch this not as a matter of
VoiceOver support, but as a matter of Apple Accessibility API support,
since the API is also used by other accessibility software such as
(presumably) MacSpeech Dictate. Sighted Dictate users won't particularly
suffer from the HTML access issues that VoiceOver users do, although
Dictate is a first-generation product and there may well be other HTML
access issues specific to it.
I note in passing that, while I think it's wrong that the Adobe Flash
Plugin does not support the Accessibility API for each platform where it
is distributed, Adobe have now opened the Flash specification to
implementors of players. This removes a legal obstacle to alternative
players such as Gnash implementing Flash accessibility along with the
rest of the Flash featureset. Those of you with the relevant programming
ability might want to look at:
http://savannah.gnu.org/support/?105660
Hope that provides some food for thought, if nothing else.
--
Benjamin Hawkes-Lewis
