Accessibility For Hearing-Impaired Users; Testing Accessible Content - MACROMEDIA FLASH 8-USING FLASH Use Manual

Accessibility for hearing-impaired users

To provide accessibility for hearing-impaired users, you can include captions for audio
content that is integral to comprehending the material. A video of a speech, for example,
would probably require captions for accessibility, but a quick sound associated with a button
probably wouldn't.
There are several ways you can add captions to a Flash document, including the following:
Add text as captions, taking care to ensure that the captions are synchronized in the
Timeline with the audio.
Use Hi-Caption Viewer, a component available from Hi Software that works with Hi-
Caption SE for use with Flash. The white paper titled Captioning Multimedia with Hi-
Caption SE for Use with Macromedia Flash MX explains how to use Hi-Caption SE and
Flash together to create an a captioned document. The white paper is available on the
Macromedia website on the Accessibility White Papers page at
macromedia/accessibility/whitepapers/. For more information on Hi-Caption SE, see the
link on the Macromedia Accessibility Captioning page at
macromedia/accessibility/tools/caption.html.

Testing accessible content

When you test your accessible Flash applications, follow these recommendations:
If you are designing your document to work with screen readers, download several screen
readers and test your application by playing it in a browser with the screen reader enabled.
Make sure that the screen reader is not attempting to "talk over" places in your document
where you have inserted separate audio. Several screen reader applications provide a
demonstration version of the software as a free download; you should try as many as you
can to ensure compatibility across screen readers.
If you are creating interactive content, test it and verify that users can navigate your
content effectively using only the keyboard. This can be an especially challenging
requirement because different screen readers work in different ways when processing input
from the keyboard—meaning that your Flash content might not receive keystrokes as you
intended. Make sure to test all keyboard shortcuts.
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