• 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

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

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?

We ran into a couple of technical glitches in the opening minutes - the audio cuts out for most of the first minute introduction, and the captioner had difficulty dialing into the phone bridge so the captions are absent for about the first 8 minutes. In retropect I wish I had pointed this out to the TPG presenters so the event would wait a few minutes to get the captions resolved but I wasn't as on top of that as I will be next time. The remaining 82 minutes is captioned, although live captioning of the screen reader demos is often written as "indistinct audio". Tough work, live captioning.

Hope the webinar is interesting and useful.

Next week there are two additional webinars. March 31 the topic is Flash accessibility and WCAG 2.0, and April 1 the topic is PDF forms and WCAG 2.0 (Correction: the PDF Forms webinar is April 8. See the Paciellogroup blog for complete information).

All of the 90-minute webinars are captioned as real-time events (using Adobe Acrobat Connect) and the captions are included in the recorded sessions.

The webinars will be held at noon Eastern time at http://my.adobe.acrobat.com/wcag2. You can find out more about the webinars at the Paciello Group's blog - see the post titled The Paciello Group and Adobe Present WCAG 2.0 Accessibility Webinars for Flash and PDF for more information. Set your calendars!

Flash is a tool to make content, but many developers aren’t providing the necessary information. We’ve published books with information relevant to the topic such as Web Accessibility: Web Standards and Regulatory Compliance which I contributed chapters to and Universal Design for Web Applications: Web Applications that Reach Everyone which Matt May on the Adobe accessibility team co-authored with Wendy Chisholm. We also have information available at the Adobe Accessibility web site -- please point these resources out to Flash developers who don’t make their content accessible.

The story is similar for PDF documents – there is tooling readily available to make PDF documents and forms accessible, and many authors do take the time to add necessary accessibility information, but not everyone does. For PDF, please point authors to the Acrobat 9 accessibility guides at http://www.adobe.com/accessibility/products/acrobat/ or to the Web Accessibility: Web Standards and Regulatory Compliance book chapter on PDF.

I feel that it is important to not over generalize from the WebAIM survey data for Flash and PDF. It is fair to say that users are rating these formats less favorably than any of us would like to see but that does not mean that the formats are not accessible. Users have interacted with examples in these formats from which they have formed impressions but that does not mean that developing accessible content in Flash or PDF is impossible. This idea is echoed in Adrian Higginbotham’s comments to the WebAIM blog announcement of the survey results where he acknowledges challenges with some Flash content but finds success with others.

Flash and PDF are tools and the accessibility of the content depends on whether the developer is making an effort to produce accessible content. Please encourage authors and developers to handle accessibility properly.

WCAG is important because it treats accessibility independently and offers greater clarity and testability for the standards. The notion that only formats that originated at the W3C can be accessible is noticeably absent in version 2, which reflects not only the hard work on accessibility done by Adobe with PDF and Flash, but also acknowledges that the web changes quickly and it is important to have objective criteria that allow authors and technology providers to evaluate their offerings to enable users with disabilities to access content developed using new techniques or technologies.

Adobe has already provided information that clarifies how the concept of "Accessibility Supported" that is used in WCAG 2 applies to the PDF format, and also provided a sample implementation of a Flash-based video application that was determined to meet Level AA of WCAG 2. This information is available as part of the WCAG 2 implementation report.

WCAG 2 will benefit authors and end users, and already there is encouraging news related to its adoption into existing and developing accessibility policies, such as the pan-European accessibility policy being developed under UE Mandate 376 and country-based standards being refreshed in the United State, Japan, and elsewhere.

Coming soon

Adobe will offer a series of best practices for using Adobe tools, to enable authors creating content and applications that use Flash, PDF, HTML, or other formats to comply with WCAG 2. These will be available on the Adobe web site in December 2008 and have been developed in conjunction with leading accessibility experts inside and outside of Adobe. We'll announce the availability through this blog and various email lists.

Please take the time to familiarize yourself with this important standard.

#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.

http://panelpicker.sxsw.com/ (you will need to register, which is painless and has no captcha).

Accessibility Talks and Panels

• Accessible Flash and Flex Applications - this panel is not fully populated, but Niqui Merrit has agreed to join it, and it'll be a great discussion.
• WCAG 2.0: Practical Implications for Web Accessibility Now - this panel is submitted by the W3C but also includes discussion of non-W3C technologies.
• Inclusive Universe 1.0 - Integrating Universal Design into Social Apps - this is Wendy Chisholm's talk with Matt May. Should be fascinating!
• ARIA Duet in the Key of A(jax) - this is a panel put on by Knowbility and will also be of interest for accessibility

Other Adobe talks

These are of interest - they aren't all about accessibility directly, but are interesting people and interesting topics

• Psst! The Money is in the Metadata! - with Mark Randall from Adobe. When I read this I think "more closed captioning"...
• Diversification: the Path to Web Design Riches - with Scott Fegette, Dreamweaver Product Manager.
• Uncovering Dynamic Content and Rich Internet Applications Through Runtime Search - with Justin Everett-Church, Flash Player Product Manager.
• How SoDA is Changing Interactive Design and Development - with Jen Taylor from Adobe.

Please vote and we'll see you in Austin!

In the documentation package linked below you’ll find:

1. Documentation of the flash.accessibility package and AccessibilityImplementation class


2. Documentation of the mx.accessibility package and accessibility implementation classes for Flex components


3. Improvements to “getting started” articles about accessibility, including a information about implementing accessibility on a sample component.

Developers have asked for this information, which has been until now not publicly shared. The documentation that we are now providing is a draft that we would love to hear comments on. To comment on this, please either log bugs on our Flex bug database at http://bugs.adobe.com/jira, orat the Flex Documentation blog entry on this topic, or you can leave comments here.

The documentation is the result of the efforts of the Flash Player, Flex, and Adobe Corporate Accessibility teams – let us know your thoughts!

UPDATE: I've modifed the files for download in response to questions from some reviewers. The zips previously contained files for accessibility that had changed in the langref, but this resulted in flash.accessibility.AccessibilityProperties apparently being removed and replaced by flash.accessibility.AccessibilityImplementation. This is not the case, both are present. Sorry for the confusion.

Download the "accessibility-only version of the Flash and Flex accessibility documentation.

The Guide was created in conjunction with AFB Consulting (the consulting arm of the American Foundation for the Blind) and provides information for users of two tools (JAWS and Window-Eyes) to help understand what is possible and expected when interacting with different types of PDF documents that are commonly found online. The types are PDF documents that are:

1. tagged correctly for accessibility


2. untagged, with no author attention to accessibility


3. scanned documents


4. interactive forms

Helping users understand the differences between these documents and how their assistive technologies can be best used is an important step toward efficient user of PDF files by screen reader users. We hope that this guide is useful, and are interested in any comments.

The guide is presently available as a PDF file, but will also be available as a series of HTML pages soon.

The guide and reader 9 can both be accessed from the Reader 9 accessibility page, at http://www.adobe.com/accessibility/products/reader/.