Adobe Accessibility

I asked Jon Avila at SSBBART Group to record a demonstration of the use of the Eclipse tool aDesigner to help evaluate Flash and Flex content for accessibility. He used Adobe Captivate to record his use of the tool and provides useful commentary. aDesigner provides very useful functionality and it is much more user friendly than my old standby, Inspect32. Take a look, and as always, please provide any feedback you have.
aDesigner is a project of the Accessibility Tools Framework (ACTF).
Recorded demonstration
Download aDesigner

Posted by Andrew Kirkpatrick at 12:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Jon Avila at SSB BART Group has posted a useful collection of hints for supporting accessibility in files generated with Adobe Captivate. Take a look at https://www.ssbbartgroup.com/blog/2009/06/08/captivate-accessibility-hints/.

Posted by Andrew Kirkpatrick at 5:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The European mandate 376 process is which will ultimately result in standards which will help ensure that products procured publicly enable access for people with disabilities. The goals of mandate 376 are (from official Mandate 376 document):

• to harmonise and facilitate the public procurement of accessible ICT products and services by identifying a set of functional European accessibility requirements for public procurement of products and services in the ICT domain, and
• · to provide a mechanism through which the public procurers have access to an electronic toolkit, enabling them to make use of these harmonised requirements in procurement process.

Adobe participated in an Expert meeting on March 23 in Brussels to discuss WCAG 2.0 implementation and the report of this meeting was recently published. Adobe encourages the European commission to use WCAG 2.0 as the basis for the EU standards, and to do so without modification of the WCAG 2.0 document.

More information on Mandate 376: http://ec.europa.eu/information_society/activities/einclusion/archive/deploy/pubproc/eso-m376/index_en.htm

Posted by Andrew Kirkpatrick at 9:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

I mentioned at the TPG Webinar on Flash that there is a way around the issues with focus trapping in Firefox. My friend and accessibility-colleague Michael Jordan has developed a simple example that shows how to get focus in and out of Flash content in Firefox (using the SWFFocus class). Also in this example he shows how to make links that are not buttons, but use the MSAA link role. This has always been possible, but usually people use the button role.

Give this a try and let us know if it works for you or if you have any suggestions for improvements.

Demonstration test file

Download demonstration file

Posted by Andrew Kirkpatrick at 11:46 AM | Permalink | Comments (8)

Tomorrow is the final webinar in the series offered by The Paciello Group. The final session is on Interactive PDF forms, using Adobe Acrobat and Adobe LiveCycle Designer. The free webinar is at noon EDT on Wednesday April 8, 2009.

Information about how to join the webinar is available at http://www.paciellogroup.com/blog.

The session will be captioned live and offered as an archived session for asynchronous viewing.

Open question - what topics would you like to see covered in future webinars?

Posted by Andrew Kirkpatrick at 9:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)