Our Favorite CS4 Accessibility Features
Creative Suite 4 is shipping now, and here's a short post on a few favorite accessibility features that you'll want to check out:
#1: Flash video playback controls are accessible by default. If you want to offer controls that keyboard or screen reader users (and others) can interact with, you get this without trying when you export using the FLVPlayback skins in Flash CS4 Professional. More detail on accessible video.
#2: DAISY export in InDesign. We'll be publishing more details about this soon.
#3: Integrated support for Color Universal Design (CUD) filters in Illustrator and Photoshop to help authors create accessible images.
#4: InContextEditing in Dreamweaver. Find out how to use InContextEditing to maintain an accessible site.
#5: New documentation for PDF accessibility in Acrobat. This is long overdue, but this is just a start - we will soon publish a series of video tutorials for accessible PDF also.
We hope you make good use of these features! Let us know about your experiences.
Comments
Cool, thanks for the heads up on access stuff. But will your movies be more accessible than the ones on AdobeTV?? AdobeTV movies are too small and when viewed full screen are too blurry. I thought Flash movies were resolution independent?!
Posted by: Andrew Meit | October 17, 2008 11:22 AM
Andrew,
Thanks for the update on the accessibility features for CS4. Great resources - I'm looking forward to the video tutorials.
A couple questions for you:
1. I've created captions using Captionate for Flash videos. Now that YouTube supports captioning, I want to add captions to the videos on YouTube. Captionate produces xml formatted files, while YouTube uses .srt formatted files. Any suggestions for a xml to srt converter? I found on application on Google Groups, but it threw a number of Java errors when I ran it.
2. How is the InContextEditing in CS4 different from the functionality provided by CushyCMS(www.cushycms.com)? From what I've read, they look very similar.
Posted by: Deborah Edwards-Onoro | October 17, 2008 12:16 PM
I am ecstatic about the direction in Flash accessibility! My immediate thought, however, was how many years will it take for popular websites to update their site using the new tools and capabilities? To my surprise, the first website I tried, YouTube, was already using CS4 Flash playback features! I was thrilled! I really appreciate the fact Adobe decided to make accessibility the default and automatic! I guess that all I have to do as avisually impaired web surfer is to urge website developers to upgrade to Flash Professional CS4. Good business decision Adobe!
Posted by: Don Marang | October 18, 2008 9:01 PM
> Integrated support for Color Universal Design (CUD) filters in Illustrator and Photoshop
As the Fireworks user I would like to see this also implemented there...
Posted by: Andrey Petrov | November 3, 2008 11:47 AM
The expanded Acrobat accessibilty documentation is great! - thanks
Posted by: Mike | December 14, 2008 6:14 AM
I'm having the same situation as Andrew with Captionate and YouTube formatting requirements. Any one found a solution yet?
Posted by: Daryl Crouse | December 31, 2008 7:30 AM