Adobe Accessibility

With the new features in Flash CS3 for captioning, the skins we've made available for accessible video presentations, our support for the DFXP caption data format, and new work on CC for Flash by NCAM I'm seeing a lot of new captioning examples. Someday there will be too many to point out when new ones come available, but in the meantime, here's another. This one is also by the Library of Congress and relates to the 2007 National Book Festival and uses the FLVPlayback skins.

The example is at http://www.loc.gov/bookfest/. It includes captions and is screen reader and keyboard accessible, and also offers a transcript.

Posted by Andrew Kirkpatrick at 11:27 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

I'm pleased to announce that Matt May is joining my team at Adobe working on accessibility. Matt will be working interally and externally, with Adobe product teams and customers to address accessibility in Adobe products, ensure interoperability with assistive technologies, and ensure that customers are aware of the many accessibility features that already exist in our products.

Matt is sure to be familiar to many of you from his work at the W3C. He joined the W3C/WAI Web Content Accessibility Guidelines Working Group in late 2000, co-edited the first JavaScript techniques document for WCAG 2.0 in 2001, and went to work full-time for the W3C in 2002. During that time, Matt was staff contact for the WAI Authoring Tool and User Agent Accessibility Guidelines Working Groups (ATAG/UAAG), and the Protocols and Formats Working Group, which reviewed W3C and related specs for accessibility. Matt's most widely-seen W3C work is probably the W3C Note, "Inaccessibility of CAPTCHA".

In 2005, Matt co-founded a standards-based design firm named Blue Flavor, and since January, Matt led client-side development on a new merchant platform for Amazon's enterprise group.

We're excited to have Matt on the Adobe accessibility team! Welcome Matt!

Posted by Andrew Kirkpatrick at 10:19 AM | Permalink | Comments (8)