[thelist] flash accessibility/usability

Erik Mattheis gozz at gozz.com
Wed Feb 27 02:38:00 CST 2002


>>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?

No - I mentioned that most all search engine referrals go to the
non-Flash version, and there's currently no way to get to the Flash
version from the HTML only version (or vice versa) so that skews the
numbers in favor of the HTML only version.

There were somewhere around 1000 search engine referrals which would
skew it between 1 and 2% and I'm running a 404 through a CF template
which counts as a non-Flash page view. But as the vast majority of
visitors enter through the front page and any skew goes toward the
HTML version, I'm quite confidant that more people click to enter the
Flash version.

Someone here made a good point that many web users might not know
what "Flash" and "HTML" are and they pick the button with the cooler
name ... who knows. (I also thought it was funny that in the same
thread someone used assumed sophistication to back up their argument
- that users could resize their windows if the lines of text were too
long, so making text span across the entire window instead of fixing
a width is a good thing).

>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?

All of my collaborative projects involve me dealing with Flash and
others dealing with the backend or me just dealing with the
ActionScript, so I can't exactly answer ... but can say:

ActionScript allows you to create custom Objects and assign new
Methods to pre-defined Objects, so if you have someone doing
ActionScript and they're good at it, they should be able to write
code independent of the design. Example:

<tip type="ActionScript" author="Erik Mattheis">

If you're going to use the same function in a bunch of movie clips,
why not assign a new method to every movie clip:

If you need to find the distance between a clip and a sibling clip,
you can assign a function called returnAngle() to the MovieClip
object:

MovieClip.prototype.returnDistance = function(other_clip) {
	return Math.sqrt(((this._x - other_clip._x) * (this._x -
other_clip._x)) + ((this._y - other_clip._y) * (this.y -
other_clip._y)));
}

use it by passing the full path so the clip you want to find the
distance to ... if both clips are on your main timeline and the
"other clip" has an instance of "two", you could say:

onClipEvent(enterFrame) {
	trace(returnAngle(_root.two));
}

Or make one to return the angle between a clip and another clip:

MovieClip.prototype.returnAngle = function(other_clip) {
	delta_y = other_clip._y - this._y;
	delta_x = other_clip._x - this._x;
	return Math.atan2(delta_y,delta_x);
}

Note: those examples will only work if both clips are in the same
coordinate space, IE, both have the same _parent.
</tip>


>If there's a
>change in flash's status on this front I think a lot of people will
>be interested -

"Smart Clips" were introduced in Flash 5 ... I've had no use for
them, but they're probably really great if you're doing ActionScript
with a designer that's freaks when they have to look at code.
--

__________________________________________
- Erik Mattheis

(612) 377 2272
http://goZz.com/

__________________________________________



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