Adobe has recently released updates to their Creativity Suite 4 (CS4) 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. I tried to force JAWS to be in Forms Mode in both versions 9 and 10 beta, to enable the arrow, Home, and End keys to affect the control, but I am not sure how to do this. Maybe, I could try to use the JAWS pass-through keystroke (Insert 3), but that would be cumbersome since you would probably want to use multiple, repeated use of an arrow key on one of these sliders. Any ideas?
Below is a short description of the enhancements from Adobe's site: 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 Visit the JAWS Users List home page at: http://www.jaws-users.com Visit the Blind Computing home page at: http://www.blind-computing.com Address for the list archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected] To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For help from Mailman with your account Put the word help in the subject or body of a blank message to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Use the following address in order to contact the management team [EMAIL PROTECTED] If you wish to join the Blind Computing list send a blank email to the following address: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
