Screen readers read aloud a description of the content, read text, and assist users as they navigate through the user interfaces of traditional applications such as menus, toolbars, dialog boxes, and input text fields.

By default, the following objects are defined as accessible in all Flash documents and are included in the information that Flash Player provides to screen reader software:

• Dynamic text

• Input text fields

• Buttons

• Movie clips

• Entire Flash applications

  Flash Player automatically provides names for static and dynamic text objects, which are the contents of the text. For each of these accessible objects, you can set descriptive properties for screen readers to read aloud. You can also control how Flash Player decides which objects to expose to screen readers—for example, you can specify that certain accessible objects are not exposed to screen readers at all.

The Flash Accessibility panel (Window > Other Panels > Accessibility) lets you provide accessibility information to screen readers and set accessibility options for individual Flash objects or entire Flash applications.

If you select an object on the Stage, you can make that object accessible and specify options and tab order for the object. For movie clips, you can specify whether child object information is passed to the screen reader (the default when you make an object accessible).

With no objects selected on the Stage, use the Accessibility panel to assign accessibility options for an entire Flash application. You can make the entire application accessible, make child objects accessible, have Flash label objects automatically, and give specific names and descriptions to objects.

All objects in Flash documents must have instance names for you to apply accessibility options to them. Create instance names for objects in the Property inspector. The instance name is used to refer to the object in ActionScript.

The following options are available in the Accessibility panel:

Make Object Accessible

(Default) Instructs Flash Player to pass the accessibility information for an object to a screen reader. When the option is disabled, accessibility information for the object is not passed to screen readers. Disabling this option as you test content for accessibility can be useful because some objects might be extraneous or decorative and making them accessible could produce confusing results in the Screen Reader. You can then apply a name manually to the labeled object, and hide the labeling text by deselecting Make Object Accessible. When Make Object Accessible is disabled, all other controls on the Accessibility panel are disabled.

Make Child Objects Accessible

(Movie clips only; Default) Instructs Flash Player to pass child object information to the screen reader. Disabling this option for a movie clip causes that movie clip to appear as a simple clip in the accessible object tree, even if the clip contains text, buttons, and other objects. All objects in the movie clip are then hidden from the object tree. This option is useful mainly for hiding extraneous objects from screen readers.

Note: If a movie clip is used as a button—it has a button event handler assigned to it, such as onPress or onRelease—the Make Child Objects Accessible option is ignored because buttons are always treated as simple clips, and their children are never examined, except in the case of labels.

Auto Label

Instructs Flash to automatically label objects on the Stage with the text associated with them.

Name

Specifies the object name. Screen readers identify objects by reading these names aloud. When accessible objects don’t have specified names, a screen reader might read a generic word, such as Button, which can be confusing.

Important: Do not confuse object names specified in the Accessibility panel with instance names specified in the Property inspector. Giving an object a name in the Accessibility panel does not give it an instance name.

Description

Lets you enter a description of the object to the screen reader. The screen reader reads this description.

Shortcut

Describes keyboard shortcuts to the user. The screen reader reads the text in this text field. Entering keyboard shortcut text here does not create a keyboard shortcut for the selected object. You must provide ActionScript keyboard handlers to create shortcut keys.

Tab Index (Adobe® Flash® CS4 Professional only)

Creates a tab order in which objects are accessed when the user presses the tab key. The tab index feature works for keyboard navigation through a page, but not for screen reader reading order.

For more information, see the Flash Accessibility web page at www.adobe.com/go/flash_accessibility/.

For a tutorial about accessible content, see Create Accessible Flash Content on the Flash Tutorials page at www.adobe.com/go/learn_fl_tutorials.

For a sample of accessible rich media content, see the Flash Samples page at www.adobe.com/go/learn_fl_samples. Download and decompress the Samples zip file and navigate to the Accessibility\AccessibleApplications folder to access the sample.

Use the Accessibility panel in the following ways to assign names to buttons and input text fields so that the screen reader identifies them appropriately:

• Use the auto label feature to assign text adjacent or in the object as a label.

• Enter a specific label in the Accessibility panel name field.

  Flash automatically applies the name that you place on top of, in, or near a button or text field as a text label. Labels for buttons must appear within the bounding shape of the button. For the button in the following example, most screen readers would first read the word button, then read the text label Home. The user can press Return or Enter to activate the button.

  

  A form might include an input text field where users enter their names. A static text field, with the text Name appears next to the input text field. When Flash Player discovers such an arrangement, it assumes that the static text object serves as a label for the input text field.

  For example, when the following part of a form is encountered, a screen reader reads “Enter your name here.”

  

  A.

  Static text

  B.

  Input text field

  In the Accessibility panel, turn off automatic labeling if it is not appropriate for your document. You can also turn off automatic labeling for specific objects in your document.

1. Deselect all elements in the document.
2. Select Window > Other Panels > Accessibility.
3. Select Make Movie Accessible (the default setting) to expose the document to screen readers.
4. Select or deselect Make Children Accessible to expose or omit any accessible objects in the document to screen readers.
5. If you selected Make Movie Accessible in step 2, enter a name and description for the document as needed.
6. Select Auto Label (the default setting) to use text objects as automatic labels for accessible buttons or input text fields contained in the document. Deselect this option to turn off automatic labeling and expose text objects to screen readers as text objects.

The two aspects to tab indexing order are the tab order in which a user navigates through the web content and the order in which things are read by the screen reader, called the reading order.

Flash Player uses a tab index order from left to right and top to bottom. Customize both the tab and reading order by using the tabIndex property in ActionScript (in ActionScript, the tabIndex property is synonymous with the reading order).

Tab order

The order in which objects receive input focus when users press the Tab key. Use ActionScript to create the tab order, or if you have Adobe® Flash® CS4 Professional, use the Accessibility panel. The tab index that you assign in the Accessibility panel does not necessarily control the reading order.

Reading order

The order in which a screen reader reads information about the object. To create a reading order, use ActionScript to assign a tab index to every instance. Create a tab-order index for every accessible object, not just the focusable objects. For example, dynamic text must have tab indexes, even though a user cannot tab to dynamic text. If you do not create a tab index for every accessible object in a given frame, Flash Player ignores all tab indexes for that frame whenever a screen reader is present, and uses the default tab ordering instead.

1. Select the object in which to assign a tab order.
2. Select Window > Other Panels > Accessibility.
3. If you’re providing an index for the selected object only, in the Tab Index text field, enter a positive integer (up to 65535) that reflects the order in which the selected object should receive focus.
4. To view a tab order, select View > Show Tab Order. Tab index numbers for individual objects appear in the upper-left corner of the object.
   

   Tab index numbers

   
   
   Note: Tab indexes created with ActionScript code do not appear on the Stage when the Show Tab Order option is enabled.