[thelist] Flash + forms

Aral Balkan aral at aralbalkan.com
Fri Nov 29 13:46:01 CST 2002


> of course, since i rarely see that on Flash sites, i can only
> conclude it's either too difficult or time consuming... at least
> tabindices in HTML are implied by the order of the elements in the
> code...

> don't get me wrong, i use Flash regularly in projects, but only when
> appropriate for the task at hand...

Don't get me wrong but from this I understand that you use Flash in your
projects even though you don't know how to make your movies accessible.
Perhaps the first thing to do is to learn about the technologies that you
use "regularly in projects". Uninformed developers are mostly to blame for
the reputation that Flash has, not the technology itself. Creating
tabindices in Flash takes a couple of lines of code and isn't
rocket-science.

> if you rely on the
> user having Flash 5 installed in order to utilize accessibility
> features, then you now have to struggle with ensuring they have the
> proper version of Flash...

Since over 90% of users have Flash 5 and above, you can safely develop for
this audience. New versions of Flash are backwards compatible with previous
versions which means that if you develop for Flash 5, you don't have to make
sure that users have the Flash 5 player, anything from Flash 5 upwards will
work. For all intents and purposes you can pretty much ignore Flash 4 and
down from now. This isn't anything new, there comes a time when you don't
have to support old technologies (eg. try loading up Netscape.com with
Netscape 3 and see what happens!)

> if you walk into a project assuming that Flash
> is the best solution based on those numbers, you've already failed on
> the usability front...

I don't. In fact, much of what I do as a consultant involves setting up
usability studies and evaluating technologies for my clients. As a designer
and developer, I admit to having a soft-spot for Flash but I am usually the
first to point out to a client instances where they can be better served by
other technologies, even if they had originally wanted "something in Flash"
(yes, HTML has its place too!)

It does get me angry, however, when people who don't know enough about Flash
to make usable applications then turn around and join the choir in blaming
the technology when others put in the time and effort to make sure that
their applications usable and accessible (time saved not bitching about the
technology helps, of course!)

Aral
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