I arrived in Brighton, UK today!! The Flash on the Beach conference started today with several workshops. Tomorrow, I will be hosting our session on Accessible Action Games at 2:45PM! Here is a sneek preview of some of the games that will be covered in the session:

See you there!

We are finaly done with our presentation for Adobe ‘Creating Accessible Sites in Flash’! Produced by Knowbility and made for Adobe, this presentation gives an overview of all the different things you can do to make Flash accessible for users with a visual, hearing or mobility impairment.

The presentation itself is fully accessible, with keyboard shortcuts, closed captioning and audio descriptions, written by Knowbility. The piece will be hosted on the Adobe website.

Stay tuned for the final URL!

I just came back from Access-U, hosted by Knowbility in Austin, Texas at St Edwards University. We had a great time! I taught two classes on accessible Flash. Here are a few photos of the event:

Click on the images to enlarge them. For more photos, fan us on Facebook!

I am teaching the following accessible Flash classes at the John Slatin Access-U in Austin, in May! Check them out:

Accessible Flash I: Quality Assurance
Learn how to evaluate accessible Flash
Learn how to evaluate Flash for accessibility. This lecture will go through a checklist of accessible Flash requirements and will discuss several different case studies of Flash evaluations. You will learn just enough about Flash to be able to test for accessibility and give recommendations for improvement.

Accessible Flash II: An Introduction
Learn how to make Flash content 508 accessible
This workshop will cover all the necessary steps in making Flash content fully 508 compliant. Through hands–on practice you will learn how to program content in Flash so it can be read by a screen reader. You will also learn how to program keyboard shortcuts and make Flash content accessible through the keyboard alone.

I had a great time at SXSW09 on Andrew Kirkpatricks panel ‘Accessible Flash and Flex Applications’. I met Niqui Merret from www.jadehopper.com and Alaric Cole from Yahoo! We talked about accessible Flash and Flex, and I showed two of our accessible Flash games, a memory game and a whack-a-mole game, both of which are accessible to screen readers.

Sign up now to reserve your place at CalWAC – California Web Accessibility Conference coming to CSU Long Beach on January 12th 2009!

We will be teaching 3 different Flash accessibility classes. Read more about the class descriptions here.

Accessible Flash I: Quality Assurance
Learn how to evaluate Flash for accessibility. This lecture will go through a checklist of accessible Flash requirements and will discuss several different case studies of Flash evaluations. You will learn just enough about Flash to be able to test for accessibility and give recommendations for improvement.

Accessible Flash II: An Introduction
This workshop will cover all the necessary steps in making Flash content fully 508 compliant. Through hands-on practice you will learn how to program content in Flash so it can be read by a screen reader. You will also learn how to program keyboard shortcuts and make Flash content accessible through the keyboard alone.

Accessible Flash III: Applied Practices
In this workshop, you will get the chance to re-visit the exercises from the Accessible Flash II introduction course in more detail, and work on making a small Flash site accessible. You can attend this workshop if you are a novice, intermediate or advanced Flash developer.

Register now!

An important part of usability and accessibility is the reading ease of text. Especially when designing content for educational media, we have to make sure that the reading level of the text meets the respective target audiences. We test all the text that we write for educational children’s media against the following tests:

Spache - useful for primary age (Kindergarten to 7th grade) readers to help classify school textbooks and literature. Also defined a list of difficult words.
Powers, Sumner, Kearl - useful for most text geared towards primary age (Kindergarten to 7th grade) readers.
Fry - useful for most text, including literature and technical documents.
Coleman-Liau - useful for secondary age (4th grade to college level) readers. This formula is based on text from the .4 to 16.3 grade level range.

Any educational project should always address the ease of reading. By taking the average of these readability formulas, we determine the reading ease of our scripts.

Because there are not that many accessible Flash sites out there yet, it is helpful to add a small Welcome Message for screen reader users to a Flash site or a Flash application. This can be a small hidden text field, that is given the tabIndex of 1, so it is picked up first.

Because of Flash’ dynamic nature, it might be hard for screen reader users to detect any changes on a Flash screen after it has updated. These changes mostly occur after a button is pressed or other user action in Flash. In order for the screen reader JAWS to start reading from the top again, CTRL + Home can be pressed. This can be put in the screen reader welcome message. An example:

Welcome to the <insert title of the website here> website. Use the up and down arrow keys to navigate this Flash site with a screen reader. Press Enter or the Space Bar to select the buttons. Press CTRl + Home to scan each Flash screen from the top for changes after <insert button here>.

A welcome message like this alerts screen reader users that this Flash application has been made accessible, and serves as a reminder that the content might change. It can be tailored to the specific Flash site. For a quiz, for example, you can alert the user to press CTRl + Home ‘for changes after pressing the next button’.

To read all the tips, select ‘Flash Accessibility Tips’ on the side bar.

Writing meaningul alt text is important. Just adding ‘image of __’ is not enough, the image needs to have a meaningful description of its contents. Remember that alt texts in Flash can be longer than in HTML, so we can add more details. Here are a few Alt Text guidelines that we go by:

• Keep text short, avoid re-using words and combine sentences where possible.
• Write in the present tense.
• Describe the scene, the figures and the action. Describe any image details that are of importance to the scene.
• Start an image with ‘Image of..’
• Start an animation with ‘Animation of..’
• Use foreground/ background references to describe a scene set-up.
• Do not disclose any additional information that is not apparent visually. (For example, if an image shows a painting, then describe what this painting looks like instead of giving its official title.)
• Include all text that is written in the image. (Text as art)
• Include colors if they are of importance.

To read all the tips, select ‘Flash Accessibility Tips’ on the side bar.