Skills for Access

Why this is important

Graphical information presented in a Flash movie will be inaccessible to anyone who cannot see the content of the movie, unless an equivalent text alternative is provided. This is particularly so for anyone who is blind or visually impaired, and relies on a screen reader and/or a Braille display device to access on-screen content. Steps need to be taken to ensure that suitable text alternatives are provided for all information presented in graphical form.

General Principles

In order for screen readers to be able to access graphical content in Flash, suitable text alternatives for every graphic must be supplied when authoring the Flash movie. With developments in Flash MX and 2004, accessibility features of Flash have significantly improved over previous versions, so the Flash authoring tool can be used to provide each non-text object in the Flash movie - or the movie itself, if it is short - with a text alternative.

In some cases, though, the nature of the Flash movie may mean that the best solution is to provide a 'self-voicing' Flash movie, where the movie includes audio files of all necessary content, meaning that screen reader users can turn off their screen reader. This will still likely leave people who have hearing and visual impairments facing access barriers, and a non-Flash alternative may also be required as a result.

Before you continue

The advice on this page helps you avoid introducing a specific accessibility barrier, but it's not a magic formula. To avoid attempting to follow a technical solution that is not appropriate to the resource and its intended purpose, you need to know the context in which the multimedia resource is being used:

1. The purpose or aim of the multimedia resource in question, and whether it is being used to supplement another resource in the learning environment, or whether its use is required by students.
2. The target audience, their knowledge and expectations, and the type of browsing and assistive technology that they may be using.
3. Whether the information and experiences provided by the multimedia technology are already available in an equivalent, alternative form.

For more background on this approach, see our Guide to the use of multimedia in accessible e-learning.

Technique Details

The task of making the content of the movie accessible to someone who cannot see it is unlikely to be as straightforward as providing a text or audio equivalent for every single graphical object. In some cases you will need to provide additional contextual information, similar to audio descriptions for video, while in other cases, an object may have no meaningful textual or audio equivalent.

If you choose to try to make your Flash movie natively accessible to screen-readers, be aware that the following technique details assume that the intended audience has access to a Flash player (version 6 or more recent) that supports Flash accessibility features, plus a screen reader and a browser that supports Microsoft Active Accessibility (Internet Explorer only). At the time of writing, compatible screen readers are limited to JAWS (in theory, version 4.5 or more recent, although in fact problems have been reported with versions 5 and 6 of JAWS), Window Eyes (version 4.2 or more recent) and HAL. If it's likely that the intended audience of the resource does not have access to the above technologies, then consideration will need to be given to how the information in the Flash movie can be presented in an accessible alternative non-Flash format.

In all cases, for details of how to provide text alternatives for movie objects, we recommend you refer to the in-depth tutorials provided by WebAIM and by Macromedia - see Related Sites below. Here, we provide an overview of the process.

Static text in a Flash movie is accessible by default and requires no specific action. But static graphics, animated content, symbols or buttons must be provided with appropriate alternative text. Deciding what to supply as a text alternative will require judgement - the key is not to provide unnecessary or repetitive information, but to supply text that preserves understanding of the resource when accessed using a screen reader.

As well as providing text equivalents for all non-text objects, you must make sure that the reading order of all text is logical. This may be logical by default for small movies, and may require no specific action, but for more complex movies, you must specify a tab order for all textual objects, and to do that you must define all instances of text as input or dynamic text. For any symbol instances, you must give them a symbol name. Then, you can use ActionScript to assign reading order by specifying a tab index for each object - or, in Flash MX 2004 Professional, there is an option in the Accessibility panel to specify tab order.

However, given the highly visual and time-based nature of many Flash movies, it is eminently possible that, depending on the function and composition of the movie, adding text alternatives using the above methods may not effectively maintain accessibility and at the same time preserve the experience of the movie. In this case, there are several options:

1. Hide from screen readers specific objects of the movie that may be difficult to provide effective text alternatives or may cause a screen reader to behave unexpectedly. This includes any animated text or text that otherwise automatically changes.
2. Provide a text alternative for the entire movie, by providing a name and description for the movie as a whole, rather than for each specific object within the movie.
3. In some cases, instead of trying to provide appropriate and logical text alternatives for each object, a practical solution may be to supply all audio content as part of the movie that effectively aids understanding for people who cannot see the content - this may include spoken content that provides additional meaning to the resource. If you take this 'self-voicing' option, to avoid potential confusion or conflict with a screen reader's rendering of the content, you must inform users in advance that the resource uses audio content to facilitate understanding in a non-visual browsing environment.
4. If none of the above options is appropriate, you should explore whether a non-Flash alternative may be more appropriate - this will also be necessary for anyone with severe visual and hearing impairments. This last option should not be seen as encouraging total rejection of Flash in favour of a textual alternative - instead it encourages consideration of how the information or experience provided by the Flash resource can be provided in an additional way. As Flash is often used to illustrate or enhance, the chances are that an equivalent alternative (possibly non-digital) may already exist.

Testing

The basic objective of testing is to answer the question "Does the Flash resource still make sense when a user cannot see it?" With a self-voicing Flash movie, you can get an idea of how effective your solution is just by playing the movie with your monitor turned off!

If you've created your Flash resource to be screen-reader accessible, you should try to test it using as many different browser/Flash Player/screen reader combination that supports Flash accessibility features as possible. Limited demo versions of screen readers are generally freely available, and may be used to access the resource, but a world of caution: experts generally indicate that at least one week's regular browsing using a screen reader is required to become proficient to a reasonable level. This can mean that, for sighted people, a limited knowledge of screen reader functionality may adversely affect the value of the evaluation.

So, by far the best option for either solution is to seek feedback on the resource's accessibility from as many screen reader users as possible. Ask them if the information they hear is appropriate and adequate enough for them to use the resource in the way it is intended.