Flash and Accessibility: a possible marriage
di Matteo Penzo
Pubblicato il 18 Aprile 2006
(This article has originally been written for Idearium.org, The premiere Interaction Design Italian magazine)
The following article is taken from my speech at Macromedia FATW04, the last BIG techies-related event Macromedia held in Italy, focusing on the theme of accessibility related to the Flash world. Once again, I am back to this topic I have been dealing with on the Idearium.org site back in 2002, when the MX version of Macromedia software had just appeared.
At the moment, accessibility is a real hot theme (a fact confirmed by its presence as one of the topics in the main Macromedia educational event in Italy and the pletora of sites about flash accessibility); nevertheless – in spite of all the talk about it – the accessible websites are nothing but a niche (and just let me state in advance that my non-business related sites are not part of that niche). What I would like to do now is explore the possibilities of an accessible design, in order to better understand its future developments.
Definition and application areas
Here is the definition of accessibility according to the first paragraph of Stanca law (similar to section 508 in US): “The ability of data processing systems to supply usable services and information, avoiding every kind of discrimination even for those users who - due to particular disabilities - need specific assisting technologies or configurations.
And here is the definition of assisting technologies: “Those tools and technical solutions - both hardware and software – allowing disabled users to take advantage of the services supplied by data processing systems, by overcoming or reducing their disadvantaged contitions.”
Apart from the definition given by the law, the meaning of accessibility concerns guaranteeing access to all users, including the disabled ones, to EVERY kind of device technology.
For these reasons, the term “accessibility” is more and more often connected to “universability”; while once we had systems designed to suit the needs of an average user - so that all other kinds of users had to to adjust themselves - during the last years that idea has gradually been abandoned.
It would therefore be incorrect to consider accessibility as exclusively connected to disabled users; accessible design is for all kinds of users. Not to mention the fact that, considering the constant increase of the average age in western societies, we should expect the percentage of elderly users – that is to say of users predisposed to various disabilities – to grow significantly in the years to come.
And that is why accessibility concerns us all. Sooner or later, we will all have to make use of an interface in disabled conditions.
Accessibility and user experience
Both accessibility and usability concur (with the help of many other factors, such as the emotional impact of the interface on the user) in building a positive user experience, that is to say a profitable relationship between the user and the website or application.
We could define it as the set of actions (what the user does), reactions (the response the user gets) and sensations (what the user feels) that are part of the act of browsing. Another very important factor is the role played by the memory that the user is left with after experiencing your browser. Being a guarantee for availability, accessibility must be contempleted before every possible discussion about usability, for even the best interface is nothing if you cannot reach it.
Designing for accessibility means taking into account the crucial matters regarding design and development, such as:
- short and long titles and descriptions for all multimedia elements (movies, audio, animations…);
- separating the structure from the content;
- updating and synchronizing textual and multimedia contents;
- evaluating the perceived downloading times.
An accessible interface is a strong added value to your products, because it widens the range of potential users and fruition contexts. Your website will not then be limited to the world of computers: it will also be adaptable to mobile devices, iTV and so on…
Flash for Accessibility
Flash has often been criticized for having concurred to the birth of new usability and accessibility problems on the web; quite a lot of usability gurus have defined it as one of the plagues of the last millennium. The notorious intros have been boring us all in every single site…
The burden Flash has been carrying upon its shoulders is quite heavy indeed:
- total lack of interaction with movie files when operating on the keyboard;
- no chance of introducing alternative texts;
- back and forward buttons often disabled;
- no chance of bookmarking internal pages for Flash-developed sites…
It is thus certainly true that, until just a few years ago, assisting technology users were not able to take advantage of Flash-developed contents; but what about today? Is the situation really as tragic as they picture it?
Peculiar problems
Up until version no. 6, Flash contents have been invisible for every kind of assisting technology; in order to make them accessible, the modification of the developing environment and of the software plugin has been a necessity.
Now, before we continue our exploration, I believe we should profoundly understand the way accessibility works within a Flash environment and, as a consequence, the limitations we will inevitably meet. Microsoft Active Accessibility (MSA, residing on the O.S.) is the intermediary between Flash and the screen reader. The Flash player is in charge of moving the contents from the SWF file to MSA; it is then up to the assisting technology to output what has been passed on by MSA.
What about the shortcomings of this technology? First of all, the necessity of working on a Microsoft O.S., with at least a no. 6 version of Flash player installed and a compatible screen reader (such as JAWS or Windows Eyes) and, above all, the need to view the file with Internet Explorer.
Although the above mentioned configuration meets the needs of most disabled users, the simple fact of recurring to some “specific” features represents a limit to the idea of universal design we should aim to.
Deciding what to make accessible and what to hide from the screen reader is up to the designer. For instance, if we consider a movie file - which would be very hard to reproduce through a descriptive text – the best thing to do is hiding it from the assisting software; in case of an image loop, in fact, the screen reader would do nothing but read the information on that object again and again, for the whole duration of the loop.
SWF vs HTML
It is now clear how easier it can be to develop accessible sites with an HTML (or, even better, Xhtml) technological base; however, this choice brings on the necessity for disabled users to choose very expensive assisting technologies such as screen readers, whose price amounts to minimum 142 US dollars.
Although, considering the developing side, Flash is an expensive choice, in this case it represents the best opportunity either from an ethical or from an economical and technological point of view.
When Flash is more accessible than HTML
One of the most interesting features concerning Flash is the internal streaming engine, which allows the developer to “cheat” the user through incredibly short downloading times (see the articles Download, streaming or… and The loading of Trollback.com) and the possibility of enjoying video and audio contents as soon as they are on the server, with no need to wait for them to be completely downloaded.
The opportunity of preordaining the beahviour of Flash movies starting from an XML file also allows the developers to create interfaces that can adjust themselves to the specific type of device they are used on.
Besides, Actionscript contains a function suitably conceived for sniffing assisting technologies so that Flash can quite precisely identify assisting technologies users and consequently adapt itself. This very aspect, together with the high potential of Flash when it comes to reproducing mp3 files, induced me to make use of this technology for applications accessible to disabled users. Among the many research projects I supervise for CT Research Center, one is particularly devoted to Flash and accessibility: FlashVoice.
I had a chance to talk about it during the LIFT06 conference in Geneve, you might be interested in the slides.
Concluding, while Flash has for a long time been considered a synonim for low accessibility, today it appears to be just the right tool to make HTML developed pages immediately accessible. It is now as usual up to the developers to fully exploit its potential.