I am largely ignorant of all but the most obvious non-VoiceOver settings in Safari. I would guess that, like IE and Firefox,, it would have a "turn off Flash" in it. A whole lot of sighted people turn off Flash, especially if they have a fairly slow connection and because, the majority of Flash content are stupid advertisements with animation and other glitz.
Can one uninstall Flash from a Mac and, if so, what happens? With IE and FF, one gets a dialogue asking if you want to install the Flash plug-in or not and has a stop asking me about this box to check. It would probably be best if Safari had a way to turn Flash on and off so we could enjoy that handful of accessible sites but not waste the cycles on ads for a new Lexus with 0% financing. As I wrote last week, Flash, Flex and a variety of other Flash related items have three major areas that keep them inaccessible for Mac users in specific and screen reader users in general. On the Mac, we have the double wammy of Flash not talking to the accessibility API properly (if at all) and the issues that all screen reader users face. As an odd bit of history, GW Micro was the first At company to work with Adobe to make Flash accessible with a screen reader using an MSAA solution. We, at Freedom Scientific, followed suit as once Window- Eyes came out with support for it our phones started ringing off of the hook asking when we would have it in JAWS. So, the customers wanted Flash and we gave it to them. In the following release of Window-Eyes, one of its new features was a checkbox to turn off Flash support and it was on by default. In kind, we added such a setting so our users could keep Flash from wasting their time as well. To this day, years after JAWS and WE added Flash support, the vast majority of Flash content authors ignore the accessibility components (like labeling stuff) so, in JAWS for instance, one will often hear, "Start FLash, 1, 2, 3, 4, end Flash content." This is, of course, useless but, if one has Flash turned on, it will make browsing the page go much more slowly as whatever is happening in the Flash segment, it is using cycles, bandwidth or both. All of this makes me quite sad as I have some pretty good friends working on accessibility at Adobe and, as it comes to content, they are more frustrated than most users (of which there are some on the Adobe team). I honestly believe that Adobe wants to do the right thing but there are so many hurdles (large and small) on all platforms that organizing a single accessibility solution with a custom layer for each OS, becomes an enormous challenge. I am not paid a dime by Adobe and I never have been. I just think they have an enormous problem that is very hard to solve. Milligrams of caffeine per hour ratio is dangerously low, must get more to get through my email. Enjoy, cdh somewhere. On Sep 2, 2009, at 5:08 PM, Chris Blouch wrote: > > Flash may be inaccessible for voiceover but it is still downloading > and > running stuff on your mac, so you might want to upgrade. > > http://www.sophos.com/blogs/gc/g/2009/09/02/apple-ships-vulnerable-version-flash-snow-leopard/ > > CB > > > --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "MacVisionaries" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/macvisionaries?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
