Ron Reagan: OK, so the next thing I want to talk about, we start to get into more of the technical details behind Flash and I will try and stay as high level as I can here, because I don’t know how many people in the room are comfortable with action scripts. Because at this level, we start to get beyond the basics of Flash accessibility. We start to get to a point where we need to be thinking about it more at a programmatic level.

The first thing is to ensure device independence. Now this is a common accessibility principle. And as you think about, primarily with Java scripts and Java programming. But in the case of Flash, most of what we do is taken care of automatically. We don’t have to think about ensuring device independence, because the player and Microsoft Active Accessibility will provide that for us.

Whenever we create a button on the stage, if it’s reported as a button symbol in Flash, that will work automatically. However professional developers sometimes like to use movie clips to create buttons, rather than true buttons. The reason behind that is that coding those buttons that are actually movie clips, you have more flexibility than with a true button. So professionals will use those movie clips. Now if they use those movie clips in a way that attaches the code directly to that button, then that’s going to create problems for accessibility.. However, that is a pretty old practice. Not many people are still doing that. But that’s generally a caution I want to provide to establish Flash developers that maybe started with Flash 3 or Flash 4, because some of them are still going to be doing that.

The easiest  check for that is, this is the reason I bring it up here, is that we want to make sure that we do test our Flash movies without a screen reader running and using only the tab and enter key on our keyboard. And it’s a very important reason we want to test it without the screen reader running. Because the screen reader will actually intercepts what we call focus. I you’ve ever used your tab key to navigate around a browser, Internet Explorer, visually you’ll notice there’s a little dotted line around the link, as you press the tab key. If you’re doing the same thing with the screen reader running, you’re not going to see the little dotted line. And that’s because the screen reader is intercepting that focus. It’s never actually giving control of the operating system; to the operating system. It’s faking you out, so to speak.

Now this is very, very good when it comes to using the tool with the screen reader, but it doesn’t help us interpret how people with mobility impairments will navigate through a piece of Flash content. Now, rather than a dotted line, Flash will use what is called a yellow box. That would be a bright yellow line around our Flash content. So we want to make sure that all of the elements we expect to operate as controls, can be accessed using only the tab key and the enter key.

Does that make sense to everybody?

Dick Banks: Yeah, I got that Bob. I understand what you meant.

Bob Reagan: OK. So now, let’s talk a little bit about Flash structure.

Under the W3C guidelines, their big theme in accessibility and html accessibility is the separation of presentation from structure. The idea there being that we want to make sure that we’re using html only for structural markup. That we can easily identify headers. We can easily identify links and quickly navigate through different elements of our site. The very sad truth of Flash content, is that there is absolutely, positively, no way to provide structure in a Flash document. It’s not designed that way initially and imposing a structure is our only alternative. We have to kinkd of, like I said before, fake it.

The way I like to explain this issue to designers who aren’t familiar with issues of accessibility, is to use Greg Vanderheiden’s metaphor of the soda straw approach. That reading a page using a screen reader is a bit like reading a page, a newspaper through a soda straw. You can only hear one thing at a time. You can’t hear anything else around that particular piece. And so in html, generally we have maybe one or two points of visual focus. Or at lease with a screen reader we only have one. Flash conten can be significantly more complex. You can have four or five pieces of visual interest in a Flash movie. We can have in a poorly designed Flash movie. We can have ten ot twenty pieces of visual interest. So we need to be thoughtful about that and how we get that to fit into our soda straw.

What I like to do to handle this is to try and provide description and cues for screen reader users, within the Flash movie, that help kind of fake the structure. So at the very least, there are cues  that help orient the Flash user as to where they are and where they can go.

At the beginning of every movie, I like to place a small description. Generally what I’ll do is have an invisible field or even attach something to the banner in our description field that wil describe what the overall structure is like. How many buttons are there? What do those buttons say? How do I move from one section to another? And so what I call that is revealing structure. And it’s the only way in a Flash movie, to convey any structure of the movie whatsoever.

Now the trick there, in revealing structure, is not to provide too much information because, keep in mind, that with every button pressed, we’re updating and moving back to the top. So I want to make sure that I’m not expecting somebody to listen to that every single time they click on a button. After four or five times that information can be incredibly redundant and really reduce the usability of the site.

So, there are a couple of different things I can do to handle that. I can either create a little widget that programmatically allows the person to turn that off, Or, I can provide a link to a separate disability screen, that describes that information and can easily be ignored.

A second issue here is what I call revealing states. And I’m going to go ahead and click on a button here, Click on the caption button. I don’t know if, Dick, if everyone clicks on the button labeled Caption, will that actually scroll down to you all?

Dick Banks: You know Bob, I have no idea. It might be a good idea to put the URL in the chat window and it will open up their browser. They could do it that way.

Bob Reagan: One of the things I want people to notice here is when you click on the button that says Caption, It scrolls down a bit like a window shade. And it sort of follows this tab, folder metaphor here, visually. Now, what’s nice about that is that usually it gives a very clear cue, where we are and where else we can go. But, for a screen reader user, that information is not available. We don’t have any cues that’s available by default, to a screen reader user to let them know where they are.

So, what I’ve done here is added a little widget that if you visit this URL with a screen reader, you’ll here this. That, as we click on the button that says caption, that the second thing that a user hears is, after the description of the site, is caption area. It fills in the information, so that there is some cue to the user. Lets them know what part of the site they’re in.

Now anytime I have a button that changes in some way, you know in this case, you can figure the caption button having two states, on and off. That when it scrolls down it’s on and when it’s scrolled up, it’s off. I want to make sure that anybody that has multiple states that those states are exposed to the user in some way. That they’re provided some information about changes to the states of buttons as the user clicks on them as we go along. Now this is fairly simple here in this navigation element. But if you start looking at interactive elements, it can get substantially more complicated. And I think that this is, some of the places where we start to see the real power of Flash for screen reader users.

You know, one of the most fundamental questions that I’m still exploring and I think that I challenge Flash developers on a regular basis, to answer is, what can Flash for a screen reader user specifically that text can’t? And I think that’s an interesting question. Because we can do things with Flash, specifically around navigation, that is really tedious or cumbersome or simply not possible in plain text, using html.  And so in taking a look at how we can use the scripting capabilities of Flash to create tools that make information easier to access and find, I think is one of the things where we’ll start to see Flash really show its true potential for screen reader users. Not thinking specifically about it as simply an obstacle for screen reader users.

OK. Does that make sense to everybody?

Dick Banks: Yeah, I’m intrigued by the fact you’re saying that what can Flash do for screen readers that we wouldn’t encounter in conventional html.

Bob Reagan: It’s an interesting challenge because I don’t think that as one, I don’t think that we’ve spent too much time focusing on yet. I have seen a couple of different projects funded by  Access Groups for the Blind, to create games. This is one of the number one requests that I get from people who are blind. They… I don’t know if any… I don’t know her last name. There’s a woman involved with Lighthouse International, who is one of my favorite people in the world and I all I know her as Maria. I don’t know her last name. Somebody here may know her last name. She accosted me one time at a conference and anyone who knows Maria, knows what I mean when I say that, and I say that in a very loving fashion. “You sighted people waste a lot of time online and I want to waste time online too. So, go out there and make me some games and preferably Blackjack, because that’s what I want to play first.  So Lighthouse International undertook an effort to start making games for their members, in Flash. And we saw a similar effort at the Royal National Institute for the Blind in the UK, also started making games, as part of a fund raiser for one of their events they held, hold each year. And I think that, you know, you sort of go where people want to go but the interesting thing that was pressed was, what can Flash do that html can’t? And the answer is, lies in the interactivity and the scripting capabilities of Flash.

Norm Coombs: Bob, this is Norm Coombs.

It’s nice that Macromedia is working on making Flash accessible, but obviously if the Flash designers don’t work with what you’ve given them, we haven’t got anywhere. To what extent do you find that the average designer is interested in looking at accessibility and do you have any feeling., instead of the average designer, about what kind of reception this is getting on college campuses?

Bob Reagan: That’s true. I think that to a certain extent, it’s the field of dreams approach to product development. If you build it, they will come. And I think that, from my perspective, Macromedia has to assume that stance. That 508 and accessibility policies in Europe, Japan, Australia, Canada, all provide the impetus to do that. But you’ll see, even in those settings,. Even where accessibility is required, that it’s not the adoption rate, the implementation of the accessibility standards are not one hundred percent. That the weight and the force of law provides us with the moment to take an activist stance. And I think that we’ve really done that. We’ve really tried to build it and then push our customers to actually take advantage of it. And we do that for the right reasons. The social justice reasons. But you should always be a little suspicious of corporate entity that’s coming out there with claims of social justice. There are self-serving reasons behind this. That we want to be the company that ? of the government market. So that we can be the strongest in that market. We want to be… see more people use and be thoughtful about accessibility because the more people that do accessibility sites, the more people that buy our product. Because we strongly feel that we’re the best in that field.

So, that’s not inconsistent with that effort. But the fact that there is an economic rush now underlying our effort for accessibility, should give the accessibility community some feeling of security that we’re not in this for the short term. That we’re in this for the long haul. We’ve invested so much of our money in this effort, that we want to see it continue.

Now in terms of professional Flash developers. What kind of interest have we seen? I think that we’re starting to see a fairly significant interest. I know that even the talks that I’ve been involved in over the last couple of months. I participated in a conference hosted by Adaptive Environments at the Rhode Island School of Design, that was really targeted at processional developers. The Flash talks that I gave there were very well attended. But probably most significantly I look to Macromedia’s developers conference held in October in Orlando.  And there the interest in accessibility was substantial. And I was very surprised to see that. Pleasantly surprised to see that. And that gives me hope that we’re going to continue to see that this becomes not just something that’s considered required within the federal government, but it becomes part of what we consider to be best practices of design, In particular, Flash design. Across the broader spectrum.

Now within the university environment, we’re starting to see a lot of interest in accessibility. And particularly around Flash, because Flash has not been widely adopted in universities just yet. But people really want to adopt it. Now they’re looking at it at the same time because of the accessibility concerns. So, it’s almost like the university is in the exact right moment to be thinking about this. In most campuses, we don’t have accessibility policies in place yet. I would say a number of them do, but I wouldn’t consider that to be the majority. The only place I know of where there is a national government mandate for accessibility in education would be the UK. In the United States, Canada and the other countries, this is based on a broader protection of the right for people with disabilities, but nothing as specific as we see under section 508, common look and feel or the UK guidelines for government Websites.

So the university folks who are trying to get out in front of accessibility, prior to a legislative or congressional mandate to do so are really being thoughtful about their implementation of Flash, that they don’t get caught two or three years down the road and have to redesign something they’ve spent several thousand dollars developing.

Does that answer your questions Norm?

Norm Coombs: Yeah, it’s in fact encouraging. Because the whole problem is to get people really to want to use the tool and so something with it and that’s good. And I want thank you for your leadership.

Ellen Wood: Bob, this is Ellen. I got dropped off by my server at one point and had to come back on. But being in a masters program in ? school at ? college in Vermont, just seeing how much awareness slowly coming, at lease with me taking Norm and Dick’s courses over the past four months, trying to make other people more aware and when I first used the Flash, I liked it because in MX, it does ask me tags for me to put in. But I find that even in Dreamweaver and in Flash, it’s almost like I have to think what I’m going to do first. So when I’m learning I really have to think and draw it on paper so I’m working with those tags. It’s too easy just to click and cancel, and not put them in.

Bob Reagan: Yeah, I think that, you know, it’s one of the challenges of not only accessible design, but I think just good useable design in general, is that there is a certain amount of forethought that needs to happen that professionals designers don’t always allow. And that’s one issue. And I think the other is that, you know, we had a, somebody had written a critique of the new tools we had in Dreamweaver and, you know, was saying that well you know you may have boxes that pop up to prompt people to provide information, but if they hit escape, they can just skip that and you don’t prevent them from proceeding without providing that information. And that’s true and I think that that’s one of the things that we think is pretty important is that, you know we’ve… We can make accessibility easy, but we can’t make it a guarantee. That even if we were to force the person to complete the information that we’re (inaudible). People would eventually just start doing things like putting in, you know, zzzzzz, just so they could get by. If people don’t want to do accessibility, we can’t force them. We did look at hooking up hammers at the back of the monitor idea, but that didn’t work out so well in beta testing. We had to drop this feature. But I think that no matter what we do from a tool manufacturing perspective is providing good tools to our developers. There’s a certain amount of education that always has to take place. And without buy in, on the part of the developer and the designer, accessibility will never truly succeed.

Ellen Wood: I agree. I would not want it to be mandated, that I had to fill in the box, because you’re right. They’d put anything in it. I think it is about education and how we teach Web design. But many times we don’t give even the learners enough time to think things out or require them to draw it on paper, so then they are ready for the boxes.

Norm Coombs: I think as an educator, you know, we really want to educate people. We don’t want to mandate things. I think that would be a real mistake. You try to force people to do something they find a way around it. I know I do. So that would be a mistake. And anybody who looks for that is not facing the real world. We haven’t found a way to force people to be good or nice or polite and we’re not going to find a way to make them so stuff that’s accessible as a mandate.

Dick Banks: Hi Marisol. You were trying to talk there. Did you want to ask Bob a questions? Bob, Marison is from Mexico.

Marisol: Hi Bob. No, I’m not a very good Flash user. But I took some notes here to try them out. Thank you.

Narisol: Hi Dick

Dick Banks: Hi Marisol.

Bob Reagan: I think Dick had the Macromedia Accessibility Resource Center up here earlier. And I can take us back to that. It’s http://macromedia.com/accessibility. And all of the information we talked about today is available through the Accessibility Resource Center. And I do a fair amount of writing and try to post that information to that website on a regular basis. I’m about to do a whole bunch more writing for new initiatives that we have going on in Canada, the UK and Japan. So, I want to make sure that people pay attention to that site and, you know, take advantage of the work I’m trying to put up there.

Ellen Wood: As I told you earlier Bob, I’m using you’re white papers and I have actually given them to the other people in my classes. Because the work we did on the community college related exactly to a

Bob Reagan: Yeah, that was a fun project to do that over the summer. And I think that that’s really been an important thing for me thinking about how we move… I think faculty serve as a great model for how we move everybody towards accessibility. Because, in general they care. They’re willing to do it, as long as someone is willing to take the time to show them how tp dp ot and provide tools to make it easy to do it. But without that, it won’t happen quite as well.

Guest: Hi, I thought I’d say something because I haven’t spoken the whole time, I’m listening with my ears open here.

I’m finding it a real challenge with the people I work with, trying to spread the accessibility information I learned from Norm and Dick’s courses I’ve been taking. And anything I can find, I pass on. I find it interesting though that a lot of the Web developers who are creating Web pages don’t know anything about accessibility. And when I got off (inaudible) with JAWS, that’s when it comes to the forefront that it’s not accessible.

Bob Reagan: Is there an accessibility policy in place at your campus?

Guest: Well, I work for the federal government, so we have the common look and feel on our government Website. And theoretically yeah, they’re supposed to work but a lot of them don’t.

Bob Reagan: You know, fear can be a very powerful motivator. And, you know, it’s… What I like to do at Macromedia is, I carry a big stick but speak very, very softly. But you know from time to time, I really do have to wheel the big stick. And it may not be a bad idea to kind of go to the top level. Go to some of the mangers and say, we have to do this. And if that doesn’t work, then it might not be a bad idea to brainstorm with a group like this and try and find an outside agencies that are able to encourage an even greater pressure on the internal management of your department. But you know the idea there is that, in general, it’s not a good idea to force accessibility, but the reason we have laws and in the federal government and a lot of college campuses, is to sort of break down that last bit of resistance. The truly entrenched notions of design and I think that you shouldn’t be afraid to use that if you have to.

Guest: Well, the best I can do is pass on all the information I can. That I’ve learned and thank you very much for your talk today Bob.

Dick Banks: Bob. I certainly didn't mean to take up this much of your time, but it was great having you.