opinios

Accessible Flash: Inaccessible!

Here's some irony for you: a whitepaper about accessibility in Macromedia Flash... and I can't access the damn thing!

I am running Firefox, the best Windows-based browser out there, and the Flash plugin I have installed has worked fine for me up in all other situations that I can remember.

But not this time.

The "document" (I use that term loosely) is published in a technology called FlashPaper, and loads into a narrow band in the top third of my browser window about 5cm tall. Not tall enough to read anything for more than about, oh 10 seconds, before giving up on the damn thing.

Ok, maybe I shouldn't get too fired up. If I launch that old dinosaur of a web browser that the rest of the world insists on persisting with - you know the one - then the FlashPaper plug-in loads ok. And I'm not going to go pointing the finger of blame too harshly, as I don't know whether the problem lies with the Mozilla plug-in or with the FlashPaper technology (anyone?)

But this is a document, for crying out loud! This isn't some interactive flying simulation with exploding kittens and backtalking frogs being minced in a blender. Good, old-fashioned text. Why not publish it as text? There are plenty of reasons to, but not many I can think of for why not. At the very least, use PDF format if you must. That P is for Portable.

This FlashPaper technology looks like a lame attempt by Macromedia to turn the web into one big Flash movie. Yes folks, that's a bad thing.

At any rate, this example blatantly breaks the golden rule of accessibility: that if you can't make it accessible, you should provide an alternative text version for your content. Just in case your users have trouble, you know, accessing the damn thing.

And the fact that he hasn't done that brings the author's credentials into question in my mind, regardless of how good his whitepaper is.