New Flash Player with MSAA on Firefox and H.264 Video
In case people haven't heard, we have a new version of the Flash Player available as of last night. The features that I'm most excited about are the support for H.264 video - so now you can have high-definition video and you can provide captions using the caption support released in Flash CS3 - and the addition of MSAA support for Firefox so users of screen readers such as JAWS and Window-Eyes that use Firefox for browsing the web can interact with Flash content. The new player version is 9,0,115,0 and you can get it at http://www.adobe.com/go/getflashplayer.
Comments
Hi Andrew, I've been trying to get harder info on the "MSAA support in Windows Plugin" in the docs.
Which browsers (brand and version) have we tested with which screenreaders (brand and version)? Should it theoretically work in other browsers we haven't tested, or are there additional dependencies? Any gotchas?
tx, jd
Posted by: John Dowdell | December 4, 2007 03:15 PM
Andrew, so no more suggesting JAWS users to use only IE?
Are there any known issues of MSAA support for Firefox?
peace, veiky
Posted by: Vivek Gaikwad | December 5, 2007 12:21 AM
Vivek,
That's right - Flash is now cross-browser with regard to accessibility for assistive technology users!
There aren't specific limitations with regard to the Flash player, but there are limitations with regard to our scripts for Flex, since there are differences in the way that JAWS scripts are able to work with these different browsers - the scripts are specific to IE. However, the screen readers have become better at identifying controls other than the handful of control types associated with HTML, so the scripts are becoming less needed.
Posted by: Andrew Kirkpatrick | December 5, 2007 07:29 AM
John,
The official testing for the plugin was with Firefox 2.0.0.8 and Jaws 9 and Firefox 2.0.0.8 and Windows-Eyes 5.
AWK
Posted by: Andrew Kirkpatrick | December 5, 2007 10:11 PM
Presumably as this is MSAA you're limited to just Win32 Firefox?
Posted by: Robin | December 11, 2007 11:51 AM
Robin, that is correct.
Posted by: Andrew Kirkpatrick | December 11, 2007 11:54 AM
Out of curiosity are there any plans to extend the Flash player to support accessibility frameworks on other platforms and OS's? I know the large majority of users with AT needs are on Windows but there seems to be some good work being down by Apple and Gnome. Firefox at least is starting to integrate with their frameworks, but I've no idea whether that helps you or not.
Posted by: Robin | December 12, 2007 12:06 PM
Its great to now have high definition video with this version........can't wait to download this new version.
Posted by: Vectorpedia(Rick) | January 15, 2008 07:56 PM