Industry news

12 March 2010

Creating accessible sites in Flash

Flash presentation from Adobe on creating accessible Flash content.

Behind the scenes

How the previous accessible Flash example content was made.

Accessible Flash video controls

About accessible video controls in Flash media players.

JavaScript Flash player

Gordon is a Flash player written in JavaScript; no Flash plugin required! This means that the iPhone (amongst others) can now have access to Flash content.

New Alist Apart article: Flash and Standards

One technology isn't necessarily better than another in all situations; use what is right for the job; an argument for broader, and more open, adoption of technologies.

Tip: High visibility mode

Users with poor vision may be using their computer in a high visibility mode. On Windows, there are several high contrast colour schemes. When selected, these will change the colour scheme to white text on a black background, or similar, as well as sometimes increasing the default text size for applications.

It is worth checking this out on your own website, to see how it fares. Here are some links on changing the colour scheme on your computer:

Common areas you should look at for possible high visibility issues are:

Text boxes and other form elements
Links, particularly when they receive the focus

How this is handled when viewing web pages in your browser depends both on your browser settings, and how the website has been coded.

A general rule is that any colours specified in the stylesheet will not be overwritten by the colour scheme selected by the user. What this does mean is that any elements that do not have a colour specified in the stylesheet, will adopt the colours specified by the users colour scheme. Further to this, given that their are two colour attributes for each element (both text colour and background colour), if one of these is present in the stylesheet, and one isn't, this can lead to cases where the text colour adopts the high visibility colour but the background colour remains static. This can result in black text being displayed on a black background, making it invisible to users.

The solution to these types of issues is to always specify both the foreground and background colour attributes within any stylesheets. Alternatively specify neither colour attribute and instead just adopt the users default colours.

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For more information:

Email accessibility@AbilityNet.org.uk
Phone 0800 269545

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