Skills for Access

Why this is important

Flash resources may contain a significant amount of both visual and audio information. Anyone unable to see the visual information is thus likely to miss out on information essential to understanding the Flash resource. To ensure that people who cannot see the visual content can understand the resource and achieve the experience intended to be provided by the resource, additional spoken audio information - audio descriptions - need to be provided.

General Principles

With Flash, no specific framework for adding audio descriptions is provided by the technology. However, the strategies for ensuring that a Flash movie is screen-reader accessible are such that the task of audio describing the media becomes almost indistinguishable from the general task of making the content of the movie accessible to people who normally use text-to-speech devices.

NB: We have provided general advice on audio description in a separate How To: Provide audio descriptions for video or animated content - general advice.

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 process of making Flash accessible to someone who cannot see the movie requires you to decide whether or not you should:

• Attempt to use Flash MX/2004's accessibility features to provide text that can be read by a screenreader, or;
• Make the movie self-voicing - that is, add as part of the movie a soundtrack that ensures that anyone listening to the movie can access the same information and experience that a sighted person would.

In making this decision, you need to consider the format, functionality and context of the movie. Either way, you'll need to include additional information (either text to be read by a screen reader or recorded speech) that allows someone unable to see what's going on to understand the movie.

For more details on making a Flash movie screen-reader accessible, see How To provide text alternatives for graphical content in Flash.

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.