[Mailman-Developers] The Philosophy of Web Use.

[Laura Carlson]

On Jul 7, 2006, at 12:08 AM, Brad Knowles wrote:

>> I'm much more
>> bugged by the Flash-only sites that are an avoidable annoyance for
>> me, but I can imagine are a scream-out-loud frustration for screen
>> reader based users.

On  August 2, 2006, at 12:08 AM, David Andrews wrote:

> As a screen reader person I will say that Flash-only can be made to
> work, there is accessible flash, but it is rarely done.  If it isn't
> implemented, a site can be useless, however you can do a good job, my
> department did a whole web training thing in accessible flash, and it
> works fine for blind users -- which is good

Yes, it's possible to build accessible Flash [1]. In theory, a Flash 
site should be as accessible as an HTML site; if it provides all the 
accessibility features that HTML provides, such as alt attributes, 
keyboard access, synchronized captions for any audio that conveys 
content, allowing the content to scale to a larger sizes, valid code, 
links, separating presentation from content, etc. Some flash content 
even has the potential to aid people with learning or cognitive 
disabilities.

And yes, the more modern versions of screen readers can render it. 
However, those screen readers can be very expensive, and many users' 
financial situations preclude even upgrading. There are still a great 
many people using legacy screen readers out there.

In time most people who use screen readers will have software that 
plays nice with Flash. Until then, though, my advise continues to be to 
avoid Flash or, if it must be used, to make sure a user has a chance to 
opt out of it for an accessible page before the Flash begins.

Currently the only way to be 100% forward and backward compatible is to 
create an accessible HTML version of a Flash site. Or only use it for 
nonessential parts of a web site.

Also Flash makes it harder for a site to rank well on the search 
engines. As far as I know, there are no search engine bots/spiders 
which can read the contents of Flash. So if you are concerned with SEO 
you need to include alternative content (ie. text, html) for any Flash 
content.[2]

Best Regards,
Laura

[1] http://webaim.org/techniques/flash/
[2] http://www.alistapart.com/articles/flashmxmoving/
___________________________________________
Laura L. Carlson
Information Technology Systems and Services
University of Minnesota Duluth
Duluth, MN U.S.A. 55812-3009
http://www.d.umn.edu/goto/webdesign/