Handling Audio And Animation; Extending Flash And Accessibility; Working With Accessibility And Components - MACROMEDIA FLASH MX 2004-USING ACTIONSCRIPT IN FLASH Use Manual

Handling audio and animation

Many SWF files contain audio, video, and narrations, because it is easy and robust to deliver this
media using Flash. When you provide audio narrations or video that contains speech, it is
important to provide captions for those users who cannot hear. You can use text fields in Flash,
import video that contains captions, or even use an XML caption file. For information on using
captions in Flash, see "Accessibility for hearing-impaired users" in Using Flash. For information on
using Hi-Caption SE and the Hi-Caption Viewer component, see
www.macromedia.com/software/flash/extensions. This third-party extension lets you create
captions that you save in an XML file and load into the SWF file at runtime, among other
advanced controls.

Extending Flash and accessibility

With the new extensibility layer in Flash MX 2004, developers can create extensions that enable
advanced authoring with little effort. This lets third-party companies develop extensions that
involve accessibility. You have several options for validating your SWF files or adding captions.
For example, a validation tool can look through your SWF file for missing descriptions. It checks
to see if a description is added for a group of instances, or if text has a label for the instance, and
tells you about any problems. The tool also examines the reading order in your SWF file, and
finds all instances that must be specified. Reading order can be specified after the SWF file is
analyzed using a dialog box.
For information on the currently available third-party extensions, see
www.macromedia.com/software/flash/extensions.

Working with accessibility and components

Window Eyes 4.2 or later, and JAWS 4.5 or later support the following components:
•
Alert
•
Button
•
CheckBox
•
ComboBox
•
DataGrid
•
Label
•
ListBox
•
RadioButton
•
TextArea
•
TextInput
•
Window
Note: Screen readers do not recognize Window and Alert instances if you use them as pop-up
windows.
134 Chapter 3: Using Best Practices