Accessibility in AIR 2

Last night the AIR 2 Beta became publicly available on Labs! There are already some great tutorials, articles, and other information on the new features. To learn more about AIR 2, I recommend my colleague's post from last night: AIR 2 Public Beta Resources.

The feature I'll focus on, however, is accessibility support, which allows you to create applications that visually impaired users can use. Screen readers such as JAWS and NVDA can connect to your application and read off visual content. Using this feature in conjunction with existing Flex components is straightforward; I've written an article that shows you how to use AIR 2 and Flex to create accessible applications, and beginning to intermediate Flex users may also enjoy the tips on the Cairngorm framework, data binding, and using the Encrypted Local Store.

If you wish to use AIR 2 but need your own custom components, I recommend watching this presentation from Adobe MAX 2009, which goes into depth on AIR 2 and ActionScript accessibility.

Finally, I've created an open source application that you can use as a starting point for your own programs: QuothTheTwitter demos how to build an accessible Twitter client in AIR 2. It's quite simple at the moment, but incorporates many of the best practices I mention in my ADC article.