Re: Spiffing up UC websites? [Accessibility using Flash]

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From: Aron Roberts (aron@socrates.berkeley.edu)
Date: Fri Nov 22 2002 - 13:00:55 PST

At 14:29 -0800 2002-11-21, Seth Novogrodsky wrote:
>The interim e-Berkeley policy (see
><http://itpolicy.berkeley.edu:7015/e-Berkeley.policy.html>) says:
>
> >In compliance with [... various public laws and university policies ...]
> >all electronic communications, to the extent feasible, must be accessible
> >to people with disabilities. If it is not feasible, alternative methods
> >must be made available to complete the same tasks.
>
>In order to make pages accessible to people relying on text readers,
>any information in Flash content needs to be made available by
>alternate means. (This can be a description of what the visual
>content is.) The Flash content on the www.berkeley.edu/news site
>contains both text and images; it appears that not even the text in
>the Flash presentations is accessible to the visually impaired.
>This would seem to be a violation of campus policy.

   As a follow-on to Seth's comments, Macromedia includes some modest
accessibility features in the latest versions of its Flash products:

   http://www.macromedia.com/macromedia/accessibility/features/flash/

   Examples of these features include alternate text titles and
descriptions, as well as features intended to aid those with motor
disabilities, vision impairment, and color vision anomalies. (In
addition, these products make alternate information available to the
Microsoft Active Accessibility (MSAA) environment for Windows, and
Macromedia notes that one Windows screen reader can currently access
this information.)

   However, authors must take additional steps to utilize these
accessibility features, as described on Macromedia's site.

Aron Roberts
Workstation Software Support Group
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