Section 16.1. Placing Flash Movies on the Page

16.1. Placing Flash Movies on the Page

For purposes of placing, treat Flash movies just like images. Put them in their predefined areas of your layout, or drop them inline and adjust their alignment in relation to the surrounding content. The main difference is, instead of clicking the Image object on the Insert panel, you click the Flash object shown in Figure 16-1.

When you do, the Select File dialog box appears. Navigate to the location of the Flash movie in your local root folder. Flash movies have the extension .swf, so you're looking for SWF files here. You might consider placing your movies in the images or img directory, just for convenience.

Click OK, and the Object Tag Accessibility Attributes dialog box in Figure 16-2 appears. In the Title field, type a short title for the movie.

Figure 16-1. The Flash object is under the Flash menu on the Property Inspector toolbar

Figure 16-2. Accessibility options for Flash movies

TECHTALK

An access key is a keyboard key that the user presses in conjunction with the Alt key to select an interactive element on the page.

In the Access Key field, type the keyboard key that the visitor may press in conjunction with the Alt key to select the Flash movie in the browser window. For instance, if you type x in the Access Key field, the visitor may press Alt-X to select the movie. The access key works on Windows computers only.

In the Tab Index field, type the tab index of the Flash movie. The tab index of an element is the order in which the browser selects the element when the visitor presses the Tab key on a web page. A tab index of 1, therefore, means that the Flash movie is the very first element selected when the visitor tabs through the page. A tab index of 10 means that the movie is the tenth element selected. (For more information about setting tab index values, see Chapter 17.)

When you're finished, click OK, and Dreamweaver inserts the Flash movie into your document window. By default, the movie appears in a gray placeholder box, as Figure 16-3 shows. To align the movie with the surrounding content, choose a value from the Align menu on the Property Inspector. Left and Right are the most useful choices for inline movies.

Finally, to play the Flash movie in the document window, as in Figure 16-4, click the Play button on the Property Inspector. Press Stop to return to the placeholder box.

Figure 16-3. The Flash movie appears in a gray placeholder box

TECHTALK

The tab index of an element is the order in which the browser selects the element when the visitor presses the Tab key.

Figure 16-4. The Flash movie is aligned right and is playing

BEHIND THE SCENES

Access keys and tab-index values are important navigational aids for those who don't browse the Web with a mouse. For some visitors, it's a personal preference. For others, it's a necessity. They might log on with nonstandard devices like cell phones, PDAs, or MSNTV, or they might not be able to use a mouse, in which case your access keys and tab-index values improve the accessibility of your site.

TIP

To prevent the Flash movie from playing automatically when the web page loads, uncheck the Autoplay option in the Property Inspector. To prevent the movie from playing repeatedly, uncheck the Loop option.

BEHIND THE SCENES

Multimedia of all kinds pose problems for strict, by-the-book, hard-line accessibility, and Flash movies are no exception. Even when you fill out the Object Tag Accessibility Attributes dialog, you don't completely satisfy the accessibility requirements that the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and others recommend.

In Dreamweaver's defense, most of these requirements don't have anything to do with the coding of the Flash movie's placement on the page. Rather, they pertain to the content of the movie itself. Multimedia presentations like Flash movies need to have content equivalents for those who can't see them. In many cases, this amounts to accessible text captions or a spoken-word soundtrack that describes in words what the movie displays visually, and no amount of Dreamweaver coding can do that. You have to build the captions or the soundtrack into the movie file itself, and if you opt for captions, you have to make sure that screen readers can find them and read them.

If you're serious about accessibility, do yourself a favor and review the W3C's multimedia guidelines at http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG20/#mediaequiv. See also the Macromedia web site (http://www.macromedia.com/) for accessibility recommendations specifically pertaining to the Flash format.