While most people detest Flash for its rather resource intensive operation, and its role in creating really annoying websites where the back and forward buttons don't work, the tool does have an important place on the web. Most internet video players, such as Youtube's, run using Flash, and as such, it's kind of important to be able to run it. eComStation has just taken the first few steps to being able to run the official Flash player - Mensys has received permission from Adobe to distribute the Windows version with eCS, which with a bit of work will work on eCS using ODIN. "This is a first step but the legal block is gone now," Mensys' Roderick Klein writes, "The writing of the code to run the Flash DLL is the next big step!"
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Member since:2008-07-15
To be fair, accessibility != cross-platform. Having said that, though, I certainly take your point 
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As a note of interest, Adobe has done nothing for accessibility. The work in the flashplayer itself for this, what little there is of it, was actually done by Macromedia back in Flashplayer 7. The little work that has happened since then has been on the browser end, integrating the accessibility APIs Flash uses into certain browsers. Adobe have done nothing since, including making it accessible on platforms like OS X and *nix. Nothing. They're taking credit for what Macromedia did shortly before Adobe acquired Flash, and this is why the state of this problem has not changed in a few years.
Perhaps something could be done with Gnash in this regard, but seeing as how it lags behind Flash in certain areas it wouldn't be the end-all of solutions at least not yet. Given how badly misused Flash has become and what a resource hog it can be, I wouldn't be sorry to see it go in any case. Not very likely, though, but hey I can dream. At least Silverlight runs a lot better, might be one of the few things Microsoft will get right in recent years.
Member since:
2006-09-30
Indeed, I've still yet to see any accessible flash... besides, the fact that it requires a plugin that is proprietary makes it impossible to use on some platforms, that is it is 100% unaccessible there, regardless the efforts Adobe might have put in it.
So I'm sorry but Adobe might say what they want regarding accessibility, but as a non-blind using BeOS and Haiku it's definitely not accessible for me:
http://revolf.free.fr/img/shot_NetD_catalogue_flash.png
(for those who can't see it's just a browser with a plain white page :p)
Clueless "web" designers putting "skip flash" links inside the flash themselves don't help either...
I found quite strange the website for Unadev http://www.unadev.com/ (french association for blind and visually impaired) have a big "f" logo as partner...
Yes the "specs" are supposedly open, and there are FOSS implementations but I've yet to see one that works, and is portable. Both gnash and swfdec have an insane amount of dependancies making them totally unportable.
And I don't know which browser you use, but I don't think the flash plugin is usable from lynx or links when used on a braille tty.
I don't think the text indexing google does carries any meaning if they just index the strings found in the binary without trying to interpret it and read them in order... at least it can help.
So for all intend and purpose flash is not interoperable and thus not accessible.
As for eCS I have no idea about how accessible it is.
Gnome ? I noticed several times that some controls are unaccessible by keyboard navigation... (typically the url bar in epiphany... at least TAB can't get me there without the mouse, didn't dig the docs for other shortcuts).
As for Haiku, well, accessibility was't much thought in BeOS. Window Manager actions were not keyboardable (unlike windows' system menu with ALT-space...). OTH, controls should be fully keyboard navigable, those that TAB can't reach are accessible with Win-TAB. It also has a well thought input method system. I've been thinking about possible things to help there, but we should probably have a large discussion on it.
Thanks to the scripting interface, it should be possible to have a daemon monitoring applications and ask them for control text to speak them out loud for ex.
Feel free to come to irc.freenode.org #haiku and help