Skills for Access

Why this is important

The ability to customise the visual appearance of a multimedia resource to suit specific access requirements is extremely important, particularly for people with visual impairments, or with dyslexia. People with limited manual dexterity may also benefit from the ability to enlarge text, and thus the clickable area of text hyperlinks.

While content created in accessible HTML can be customised to suit an individual's needs by adjusting browser settings or applying a user-defined style sheet, it is significantly more difficult for someone to customise the appearance of a Flash movie - the fact that the Flash movie looks the same on every platform is an obvious advantage for developers!

General Principles

While it is possible to effectively 'enlarge' the size of content of a Flash movie by using the Flash Player's Zoom facility, for other customisation, the design of the movie must incorporate some basic accessibility features. Options should be programmed to allow an individual to easily change important settings themselves - for example text and background colour, font style and size, or spacing between lines of text.

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

Flash does allow some automatic display customisation - for example, it is possible to enlarge text by zooming in (right-clicking on the movie will give you options to zoom in or out), while resizing the browser window resizes the movie without requiring scrolling.

For other features, you'll need to add additional code to your Flash movie. If you know some ActionScript (the programming language used in Flash), it is fairly straightforward to provide options to change the appearance of text and background to make the content of a package more accessible (in particular, easier to read).

Examples 1 and 2 show how a change of background colour or text size could be implemented in Flash. In Example 1, to change the background colour the user selects the coloured buttons at the bottom of the screen.

Example 1: Play the Flash movie.

In Example 2, different text sizes are available by selecting the appropriate buttons. Note, though, that with the ability to enlarge text comes the fact that more screen space is required to display the text - which often means scroll bars may appear. Designs should take this effect into account.

Example 2: Play the Flash movie.

In general, be aware that when hard-coded display customisation options are provided, be aware that you will inevitably be limited in the level of customisation you can offer. Given the enormous range of user needs, to suggest a definitive list of custom display options that will suit everyone is simply not possible.

But as a rule of thumb, it's worth at least offering an ability to provide light coloured text on dark background, dark text on a light (but not white) background, plus an option to display text at a size of at least 16 point - though bear in mind that even with best efforts, it may not be possible to meet absolutely everyone's needs.

Testing

Make sure that each option provided by the Flash application works as intended, and presents an appropriate range of options. Test on as wide a range of computers as possible. Try combintaions of different operating systems, browsers and versions of the Flash player, and with different monitors (cathode ray tube and TFT flat screen monitors with different resolutions and colour depth settings) to ensure all options work as expected.