Creating Equal Experiences: Fun with Flash Accessibility

If you read my previous Blog you would probably be wondering about accessibility and if it really does take away from a user's experience. From my perspective, I don't believe that you can completely provide an equal experience through accessible technology to disabled people
but, for the record, I am not totally against the idea either. The following is an excerpt from the Section 508 Standards:

"Section 508 also requires that individuals with disabilities, who are members of the public seeking information or services from a Federal agency, have access to and use of information and data that is comparable to that provided to the public who are not individuals with disabilities, unless an undue burden would be imposed on the agency"

What I'm saying is that yes we probably should do our best to provide as closely as possible an experience to our disabled users but in no way should we let this drive our solutions. Does it take away from the possibilities of creating engaging experiences? Absolutely. Take for instance all those links that I've provided in my last two posts, are any of these accessible? No, and if the developers of these pieces had taken the time to even attempt to make them accessible, these wouldn't be what they are now. Not to mention they would probably never finish these projects and would probably end up loosing their client.

This past Monday, we (a few staff members from my work and I) had a teleconference meeting with some of the accessibility folks at Adobe that included their Accessibility lead Andrew Kirkpatrick. I asked them a couple of questions that I would like to share and these were their responses (the answers are summarized):

Question: In your "Best Practices for Accessible Flash Design" document you mention that Flash is only accessible through Internet Explorer, are their any plans for this change in the near future releases of the flash player? Is this because flash uses MSAA and is only supported through objects using ActiveX?
Response: Flash is not accessible in any browsers other than Internet Explorer. This IS due to the use of MSAA technology to communicate with screenreaders.

Question: Are their plans for Flash to be accessible through FireVox?
Response: Their are no plans to support screenreader accessibility for Flash in other browsers or Operating systems such as the Macintosh operating system. Their is no plans to support screenreader accessibility in Firevox either.

Question: In your "Best Practices for Accessible Flash Design" document you mention that changes to the movie prompt the screen reader to return to the top of the movie and commence reading through the list again, but on movies that I've created the screen-reader never seems to know when a Flash movie has changed, can you elaborate more on that?
Response: When accessibility was first introduced to Flash MX, changes in the Flash movie would continuously update the data tree which was found to be confusing and hard to use for screenreader users since the screenreader would try to keep up which the changes in the Flash movie. Improvements in Flash accessibility include updating the data tree only when new buttons and movieclips are introduced to the stage. Also, the updateProperties() method should be able to update the data tree when called.

So their you have it, Adobe still claiming to have good accessibility features in Flash. Personally, I still think their is a long way with Flash accessibility, especially when we concentrate on creating rich internet user experiences. I've actually tested the updateProperties() method and, surprise, it doesn't seem to work as expected. I've also been unsuccessful with searches through the Adobe site for solid working examples of accessible Flash projects. Then again, as Andrew Kirkpatrick put it at our meeting, "you could never predict how these screenreaders are going to perform."