I've been doing a lot of work with Michigan State University's Research Center for Persons with Disabilities (RCPD for short). Their recommendation for the blind up until two years ago was JAWS with IE. They always said it was the best supported, and worked with the most websites. I guess Firefox really does a poor job of integrating into the JAWS or any other text-reading app.
Their latest tests have all been revolving around the mobile space. The reports pretty much go that iOS has some of the best accessibility, and Android is passable, at best. When writing in XCode / Objective-C for the iOS platform, by using the built-in widgets, you get accessibility for free (which includes the vast majority of the apps in the store). Android gives the developer the APIs for it, but they are rarely implemented. AIR for both iOS and Android do NOT support any forms of accessibility. We tried to jerry-wrig it up with an ANE for iOS, and it didn't work right (every time we tapped into the APIs, we lost focus of the current control). The reason why RCPD is so hot about mobile is that by default most of the apps take care many of the accessibility issues. They are designed to work with touch (no mouse), they will work well for a single-handed person, they rarely require multiple fingers to do anything, the touch areas are BIG and most often the text is BIG. Most don't utilize sound or require speech. Assuming a color pallet that uses contrasting colors, most apps are compatible with the federal laws out the gate. I hope we get access to the some of the APIs that the FP would be able to expose. It has held us back in the past, and would be very useful in the future as we try to move Flex into the mobile space head-first. -Nick On Thu, Jan 26, 2012 at 8:53 PM, David Francis Buhler <[email protected] > wrote: > Listening to the screen reader's robotic voice reading the same content > over and over for 100s of hours while testing accessibility....now, > that...is a nightmare. > On Jan 26, 2012 8:25 PM, "Rick Winscot" <[email protected]> wrote: > > > What would be great for 508 is to implement first class mechanisms for > > accessibility ... creating new components that are accessible (the Flash > > way) is a nightmare. > > On Jan 26, 2012 5:53 PM, "Michael Jordan" <[email protected]> wrote: > > > > > > > > On 1/26/12 1:54 PM, "Alex Harui" <[email protected]> wrote: > > > > > > >> -----Original Message----- > > > >> From: David Francis Buhler [mailto:[email protected]] > > > >> Sent: Thursday, January 26, 2012 10:48 AM > > > >> To: [email protected] > > > >> Subject: RE: Pushing Flex components thorough the GPU > > > >> > > > >> Windows, Jaws, jaws scripts, and IE. :) > > > >> On Jan 26, 2012 1:29 PM, "Alex Harui" <[email protected]> wrote: > > > >> > > > >I'm not the expert, but one of our Adobe PPMC members is (Michael, are > > > >you out there?), but I believe we work with more than just Jaws and > IE. > > > > > > > > > > > >Alex Harui > > > >Flex SDK Developer > > > >Adobe Systems Inc. > > > >Blog: http://blogs.adobe.com/aharui > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > That's correct, Alex. > > > > > > Screen reader support for the Flash Player is available on Windows in > IE > > > and Firefox for swfs embedded with wmode="window." > > > > > > JAWS, Window-Eyes, and the open source NVDA screen readers can read > Flash > > > content, but to date JAWS has the most comprehensive support for Flex. > > > This is because JAWS has scripts that work around limitations with the > > way > > > that the Flash Player is able to describe content through its > > > accessibility API. > > > > > > The Flash Player's accessibility support was implemented back in 2002, > > > around the time that the term "rich internet application" was coined. > To > > > limit the performance impact of maintaining, updating, and > communicating > > > role, state, and value information on a deep hierarchy of accessibility > > > objects, the decision was made to only expose one level of hierarchy > and > > > allow an accessibility object like a list to maintain a single array of > > > children with no decedents. This is unlike the behavior of desktop > > > applications which are able to expose the full hierarchy of a tree, > > panel, > > > or data grid with nested children. JAWS scripts improve the way the > > screen > > > reader user interacts with more complex controls like the TreeView and > > > ComboBox in IE. > > > > > > > > > Michael Jordan | Accessibility Engineer | Adobe > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > >
