Flash is messing with my Accessibility. Please Help!

boogie man

Hi all,

I'm making a page for a website which needs to be fully accessible to the W3C standard. However when I insert a flash movie into the HTML page I am not able to use my TAB key to go through the links on the page. I've tried using the "tabindex="1"" etc. This lets me go through the links once and once only. Dose any one have any ideas about this?

Thanks in advance,

Boogie Man.

Mr E

Are the links in the movie or outside it ??

- Dave.

Mr E

If in the movie, this should help (from the Flash Help File):

Custom tabs for accessible objects

You can control tab order in Flash movies using ActionScript properties. If you create a custom tab order for a movie, the accessible objects follow the specified tab order. You should include all accessible objects in the tab order, even when those objects do not represent tab stops. For example, dynamic text and movie clips should be included in the tab order so that screen readers know when to read these objects.

Tab order can be assigned to dynamic text objects, buttons, movie clips, and input text fields. To assign tab order to a static text object, you must first convert it to a dynamic text object. You can use the ActionScript tabIndex, tabChildren, or tabEnabled methods to assign custom tab order. For more information about these methods, see the online ActionScript Dictionary in the Help menu.

If you provide a custom tab order for a given frame in your movie, and you do not specify a tab position for one or more of the accessible objects in that frame, the Flash Player will disregard your custom tab order when users are using a screen reader.

More info on accessibility: http://www.macromedia.com/macromedia/accessibility/features/flash/

If outside flash, then tabindex should work. I don't think you need the quotes, though....

- Dave.

boogie man

Sorry guys,

The links are just in the HTML bits!

Any other ideas?

Mr E

Oh, well I think you'll find that tabbing should work more than once. (Unless you have some weird javascript OnBlur on a field?)

Keep pressing it!!

Also, note that tab index doesn't work on any version of Netscape less than 6.

- Dave.

boogie man

Got it in one! I'm using onFocus/onBlur to make my rollovers work with the tab button. I'll take these off and hopedully I'll be back in business. But then there is the problem of the rollovers only working with the mouse. I know it's not critical to accessibility, but that issuse should be accounted for too!

One step at a time...

Thanks,

Boogie Man

boogie man

TMB, I tried taking all the behaviours off the page but it still does not work, I can't tab through the links. I even tried it on a new page with just 2 links and 1 flash movie - still won't work. There has to be a way around this! Another thing I tried was to make a IFRAME and call in the flash movie from an external page. No joy!! Why is flash doing this to me? It must be something personal!!

Boogie Man

Mr E

Is the page on the web? I'll have a wee look.......
PM me with the details if you don't want to post them here....

- Dave.

Mr E

OK, thanks for the links.

I've had a play about with it, and it looks like the animation is keeping the focus, so when you tab onto it, you can't get off again. Do you have some actionscript controlling the tabbing?

Best solution I think is as follows: On the object tag, put a tabindex="-1" on it. That way, it'll never be tabbed to.

<object classid="classid" codebase="codebase" width="480" height="280" tabindex="-1">

Not much use if its an interactive animation (which yours isn't - so far, anyway!), but its a quick and dirty fix.

Rgds,
Dave.

boogie man

Thanks again!!:D