Accessibility for Flex

Flex applications are highly visual; their interactions demand more user inputs. Following are the tips to make flash/SWF accessible.

1. Write use cases that included people with disabilities
2. Developers should preview the content under the conditions of these use cases, example: using screen reader, http://firevox.clcworld.net/about.html , http://www.freedomscientific.com/fs_support/BulletinView.asp?QC=337
3. Enable Accessibility in Flex Project, Flex Project > Properties >Flex Compiler > Generate accessible SWF file
4. A simple layout, use of accordion and tabs helps to control reading order.
5. Label and its associated image/graph/ table/text should be in same component.
6. Assign value to “tabIndex” attribute
7. Provide instructions using ‘accessibilityProperties’
8. Give keyboard access for all mouse events
9. Use ‘toolTip’ for images, additional information can be given using description property of the object ( too much description can make application verbose and difficult to use)
10. Do not use colours solely for information, example: showing red colour to show “faulted’ state. Colour information should be used with additional text information.
11. Default ‘focus’ style can be edited if users find it too light.

http://www.adobe.com/accessibility/products/flex/best_practices.html
http://www.nngroup.com/reports/flash/RIA-usability.pdf