Flash Accessibility Design Guidelines

Adobe Flash CS3 Professional software helps to speed up accessible application development using some of the main user components. These components can automate many of the most common accessibility practices related to labeling, keyboard access, and testing, which helps ensure a consistent user experience across rich applications created with Flash CS3. The set of accessible components available with Flash CS3 includes the following.

Accessible Components List

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For each ActionScript 3.0 component, you only need to enable the accessibility object by using the command enableAccessibility(). This includes the accessibility object with the component as the movie is compiled. These options are turned off by default due to the difficulty to remove an object from the component, therefore it is very important that you enable accessibility for each component. Luckily, this step needs to be done only once for each component; it is not necessary to enable accessibility for each instance of a component. Here is the sample code added for the checkbox component:

import fl.accessibility.LabelButtonAccImpl;
LabelButtonAccImpl.enableAccessibility()
import fl.accessibility.RadioButtonAccImpl;
RadioButtonAccImpl.enableAccessibility()
import fl.accessibility.ButtonAccImpl;
ButtonAccImpl.enableAccessibility()

It is best to attach this script to the first frame in the movie.

Here is a sample using a simple label, radio buttons, and a button component.

Try it out!

1. Select one or more component(s) from the list above
2. Create them in flash
3. Enable accessibility - enableAccessibility()
4. Attach the appropriate script to the first frame in the movie
   • (you may look these up under actions panel under the fl. accessibility folder).
5. Test in a screen reader using Internet Explorer 5 or higher.

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