[thelist] flash accessibility/usability

[Andrew Forsberg]

>These are the people's choices:
>
>Flash home page: 62.5 %
>HTML home page: 37.5 %
>
>other Flash pages: 60.9 %
>
>other html pages: 39.1 %

Hi Erik

Interesting stats. So the flash site suffers from users dropping off
after the home page, while the html pages don't to the same degree?

I've always been curious how larger flash-site web shops deal with
collaboration. Have the tools progressed to a stage where developer A
can be working on one part of the system, while developer X is
working on another? e.g.: how do you deal with a situation where the
client is phoning up to demand the dancing gingerbread man have
coca-cola coloured lips, while someone else is working on the
scrollbar gui? Does the gingerbread man have to wait? Does the gui
developer go outside for a cigarette?

I ask because one of the primary reasons I've talked all of my
clients out of touching flash on any commercial site (apart from
'value added' stuff like optional games, etc) is the incredibly high
cost of maintenance, and the costs associated with meeting deadline
difficulties because development duties can't easily be divided
between design, scripting, ui, animation, and editorial. If there's a
change in flash's status on this front I think a lot of people will
be interested -- in the meantime it's more or less limited to
one-off, 'just make it look purdy', jobs.

Otherwise, plain old html / xhtml has the edge every time as a result
of its three to four year old move to separate information from
design via CSS and XSLT, from backend via what-have-you server-side
languages and dbs, and from interaction via JS and DOM.

That said, I am still interested to hear about how your company deals
with these sorts of situations.

Cheers
Andrew

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