Welcome!

Adobe Flex Authors: Liz McMillan, RealWire News Distribution, Maureen O'Gara, Yakov Fain, Keith Swenson

Related Topics: Adobe Flex, ColdFusion, AJAX & REA

Adobe Flex: Blog Feed Post

Adobe Flash and Flex Accessibility with Screen Readers

If you are dealing with 508 compliance and wondering if a Flex application is accessible, this is your post
By Rob Rusher
Article Rating:
September 8, 2009 01:15 PM EDT
Reads:
 1,292

First, yes, screen readers can read Flex applications. And yes, its fairly easy. But, I’ll discuss how in a future post.

But, if you’d rather send people to your old HTML version of your site when using a read, there is good news. Flash Player has the ability to detect if a screen reader is running on the client machine, even if JavaScript is disabled and/or the Flex application is not compiled as an “accessible swf”. This is possible with the Accessibility class.

It is important to note that if the Flex application is compiled as an “accessible swf”, the screen reader will also be able to read content in the swf. If not, the screen reader only reads the words “flash movie start” whenever you interact with it. Talk about a usability buzz kill.

So, here is the code to see if a screen reader is currently running (not just installed) and then adds a LinkButton that calls a navigateToURL on click.

Read the original blog entry...

Published September 8, 2009 – Reads 1,292
Copyright © 2009 SYS-CON Media, Inc. — All Rights Reserved.
Syndicated stories and blog feeds, all rights reserved by the author.

More Stories By Rob Rusher

Rob Rusher is an Adobe Certified Expert (ACE), Community Expert, and Certified Instructor (ACI). In his role as Principle Consultant for On3, he leads an Adobe software enablement practice to help his clients build rich Internet applications and to rapidly increase their knowledge and skills to better support their organization's goals. He has taught and mentored the technical teams at Standard and Poor’s, eBay, IBM Global Services, the Social Security Administration, and other Government and Fortune 100 organizations.

Because of his depth of knowledge and long standing relationship with Adobe, Rob was selected to write the Certified AIR training course as well as the ColdFusion and Flex certification exams. Rob has also co-authored four best selling books on building secure, cutting-edge and rapidly developed applications using Adobe AIR, ColdFusion and Flex. He is also very active is organizing and speaking at Adobe conferences and user groups. In addition to growing his software consulting practice, On3, Rob has been building expertise in rich client application development on a wider variety of devices and platforms that extend the applications to change the way we all create and live.

On3 provides consulting, mentoring and training services to help organizations grow their own experts from within. For more information, visit us at www.On3solutions.com. Rob Rusher maintains a weblog devoted to Adobe Flex and other Internet technologies at www.RobRusher.com.