[thelist] Flash 5 Accessibility Kit, search engines?

Shirley Kaiser, SKDesigns skaiser at skdesigns.com
Wed Mar 21 16:38:22 CST 2001


Hi everyone,

I'm hoping one or more of you brilliant people out there can provide an 
answer to a question I have at the moment....

[I'm cross-posting this with another list, too, so I apologize to those who 
might get this twice...]

I'm making some final notes to an article I'm finishing on designing for 
search engine optimization, and I have a question about Flash 5's 
Accessibility Kit, specifically its feature of exporting text into an ALT 
tag within the <NOSCRIPT> tag.

http://www.macromedia.com/software/flash/productinfo/accessibility/

 >>
The Macromedia Flash Accessibility Kit includes the Accessibility HTML 
publish template. Macromedia Flash's Publish feature enables you to make 
all of the text and text equivalents from your Macromedia Flash movie 
available to be interpreted by a screen reader or other assistive 
technology. The template facilitates this by exporting text into an ALT tag 
within the <NOSCRIPT> tag. The template also detects the presence or 
absence of the Macromedia Flash player.
<<

Aside from the accessibility issue benefits, there may be even a small 
advantage for search engine optimization by having the Flash contents 
within the <noscript> tag. I haven't found anything on this, however, 
except at Danny Sullivan's site in the members only area in terms of its 
use with JavaScript (he states it's not a good hack to get search engines 
to skip the JavaScript code since the content inside the <noscript> tags 
will most likely be read by the search engines, not ignored. (duhhhh!!!)

So I'm wondering if any of you have used the <noscript> tags to provide 
alternate text for people without Flash or other reasons and if by chance 
you've found any benefits at all in terms of search engines. I also 
recognize all too well that this would only be one small factor of many for 
good rankings, of course.

It might be one of those things that sure doesn't hurt but may not make any 
difference, too.

Any info, resources, thoughts will be greatly appreciated! Thanks!

Warmly,
Shirley

-- 
Shirley E. Kaiser, M.A.
SKDesigns  mailto:skaiser at skdesigns.com
Website Development  http://www.skdesigns.com/
Pianist, Composer  http://www.shirleykaiser.com/
Moderator, I-Design http://www.audettemedia.com/lists/idesign/summary.html





More information about the thelist mailing list