Hi Thomas,
I got what you mean and with an infinite number of custom controls it is
practically impossible to get them all.
But there are some controls or technologies which have been around for
years.
I obviously don't know how much changes they got over the years.
But I could give you a simple example of what I meant when I said that some
controls should be made fully accessible.
We both know that for example JAWS is capable to read some flash content
within a web browser (e.g. Internet Explorer or Firefox).
Not every Flash module is a player for videos or contains animated material
itself.
If I download a site which uses one embedded .SWF file (HTML code), I can
have that SWF file.
If I download the Standalone Flash Player from Adobe and link my .SWF file
with it, I get a new self contained Flash file.
It is another .exe file with the SWF file included in it.
This .EXE file can be run on any computer even if the Flash Player is not
installed on that computer.
If I run this new file, JAWS will be unable to read the absolutely same
content you could have read on whatever website you took the file or files
from.
No one knows why you can't read the window of that application, allthough
the controls of the Flash file itself were not altered from the web version.
Flash Player was there before or near the release of Internet Explorer 4.0.
JAWS was probably around for the same time.
And with more and more Windows computers being sold, more people got
internet and such more people used such technologies as Flash or Shockwave
or later Microsoft Silverlight.
I had to access a professional online banking service (within a place I
worked at) which was built with Silverlight.
At this time it was supposed to be a job requirement to connect with this
site.
This company specifically employed blind and visually impaired people.
We had blind workers and some were in training and some tutors and higher
ups were also blind or visually impaired.
At that time we only had JAWS 10 (there was no newer version at that time).
We blind people couldn't use the online banking feature.
Do you want to know why?
Because it was a Silverlight application on a web server embedded into HTML
content.
We barely got the online database application to work and we needed access
to their data, so we had to use their software to connect to them.
This was at that point a real problem for us.
We could not solve this.
We asked the visually impaired people in the company to help us.
But without sighted assistance it was totally impossible.
The point of this long story is that some technology is used really often in
the sighted world.
And while you are right that we can't make our screen readers know
everything non standard, we should at least do with known interactive
content like Silverlight or Flash, when it is taken out of a web browser.
There must be a reason why JAWS can read PDF files (with Adobe Reader) like
a web page.
But if it works for a browser or a mail client or a the mainstream PDF
reader, surely it should be made possible to do it with the main web
technologies which were there at the beginning of modern screen readers.
And since that the beginning I have never seen Flash Player (binary, not web
object) support and no explanation why this is.
This were just examples of the often used and common technologies or
programs.
And at least they should be usable with screen readers.
---
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