Flashability

• Introduction
• Blindness
• Low Vision
• Motor Skills
• Cognitive
• Hearing
• Standards

Common Issues

The biggest issue with Flash, in general, is that it doesn’t comply with web standards. This insists that Flash content isn’t accessible to search engine spiders, is a nightmare on portable devices and far from accessible to persons with disabilities. Web standards are a set of rules, or rather, recommendations, passed by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). These recommendations aim to give web developers guidelines to follow that will help make their websites accessible to as many people as possible. Flash’s native lack of support for these guidelines often hinders the use of it across the Internet. Fortunately, there are some pretty simple techniques to work around this flaw.

The first step to creating a more accessible Flash website, is choosing a proper embedding method. Embedding is simply the act of placing the Flash content into an HTML page. The best way to do this is by utilizing SWFObject and its JavaScript API. SWFObject is a refined Unobtrusive Flash Object (UFO) method and uses simple JavaScript to not only embed the Flash content, but also allow the use of proper alternate content mark-up. This content, because it uses standard mark-up, will be just as accessible as any other HTML based website. This technique however, essentially, creates two sets of content: one inside a Flash object and another within the mark-up. Luckily, this annoyance is easily resolved by pulling the content into both the SWF and the HTML dynamically through one database. Economically, this is best option developers could choose if their Flash website needs to be accessible.

Alternate Content Demo

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