Follow-up: After re-reading your post- Since these changes are all on
the
creative side, should we be able to benefit from these improvements
without
downloading anything (including newer versions of Flash) on our end?
Cher
-----Original Message-----
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
[mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Don and Cher
Bosch
Sent: Tuesday, October 21, 2008 1:35 PM
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: [JAWS-Users] Advances in Flash Accessibility with JAWS
Since this product says 'Professional' though, is it only available in a
paid version? Or is there an update for the free version of Flash which
has
these new accessibility features? Thanks.
Cher
-----Original Message-----
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
[mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Donald Marang
Sent: Sunday, October 19, 2008 12:06 PM
To: [email protected]
Subject: [JAWS-Users] Advances in Flash Accessibility with JAWS
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
AdobeR
FlashR 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
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