Skills for Access »

Video Clip 5

Video Transcript

Léonie: I'm going to a site now that's got Flash that appears to be used for its navigation. It's hard to tell because there are buttons in the Flash that presumably will tell a sighted person exactly where to go and what they need to be doing, but to me it's just announced as button, which is completely unhelpful and unexplanatory.

That's a very, very common problem with Flash in terms of screen reader accessibility, but this particular web site has gone a stage further and they've included music in their Flash animation, which starts with no apparent way of being stopped that certainly I can find and which, of course, quite naturally drowns out the screen reader.

So...

Screen reader: Forward blank table with blank blank Macromedia Flash movie will start, button.

Léonie: Movie will start. There's the button and you can't hear anything.

Music from Flash movie begins.

Léonie: And there's the music! And I don't know if you could hear through that that you could hear 'slash home button', slash something else.

They are the links, but because they're graphical and they haven't been given an alternative description for people with a screen reader they're not particularly easy to appreciate.