Chapter 23. Making Movies Accessible

According to both professional standards, such as the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines distributed by the World Wide Web Consortium (http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG10), and legal standards, including Section 508 of the U.S. Rehabilitation Act (http://www.section508.gov), the responsibility of ensuring that content is accessible falls on the content provider.

Accessibility refers to the potential for all users to access content electronically. Enabling electronic access to content generally requires an awareness of both the many types of disabilities that can prevent a user from accessing content and the assistive technologies that are used to overcome barriers to accessing content. Indeed, assistive technologies remove much of the burden of making content accessible.

The U.S. Census Bureau in 1997 estimated that nearly 20% of individuals in the United States have one or more disabilities. In a country with roughly 280 million citizens, that is more than 50 million people. Professional and legal frameworks have emerged to facilitate, promote, and even force content providers to meet the needs of these users. In addition to the moral and legal reasons to do so, making content accessible makes good business sense. Benefits include the following:

• Organizations extend their reach to a broaderand often underservedaudience.

• Organizations communicate to all users that they take customer needs seriously.

• By making content accessible, organizations also make it more compatible with future technologies that haven't yet emerged, thanks to the separation of content and presentation.

Collectively, these benefits outweigh the costs of making content accessible. As discussed later in this introduction and throughout the chapter, Flash has numerous accessibility features that facilitate the process of making Flash content accessible. Moreover, accessible solutions are often low-tech and easy to implement, often involving plain text or static HTML.

Several kinds of disability can affect the user's experience with electronic information. For every disability, several options exist for providing alternate means of accessing content, and in many cases, a given solution works for multiple disabilities, as shown in Table 23-1.

Table 23-1. Common disabilities and practical accessibility accommodations

Disability	Possible accessibility accommodations
Blindness	Audio alternatives, including screen readers and audio narrations
Limited vision (worse than 20/70)	Magnification, high-contrast colors, audio alternatives
Color blindness	High-contrast colors, content that doesn't rely on color (e.g., "click the red box for X, or click the blue box for Y")
Hearing impairments	Captioning, visual cues and/or feedback, ability to turn off music soundtracks that may interfere with spoken text
Motor disabilities (limited reach and strength, can't use mouse)	Keyboard-navigable movies

Although the burden of offering accessible content falls on providers, many available assistive technologies help users gain electronic access to content. Assistive technologies include both user agents and alternative input devices. A user agent is any software that enables a user to access web content, including browsers, screen readers, Braille displays, and so on. Alternative input devices include modified keyboards, touch screens, voice recognition, and head pointers.

Because assistive technologies and user agents vary so significantly in the way they provide access to content, and because all user agentsassistive or otherwisechange so frequently, it is impractical to worry about the specifics of any given one at any point in time. A more useful goal is to separate content from presentation sufficiently that all user agents can correctly interpret and present its structure and information to the user. Content that is able to be correctly interpreted and presented/ rendered to the user by a user agent is said to transform gracefully.

Graceful transformation is both the goal and requirement of every content provider. In some cases, it can be as simple as offering an alternative version of a given piece of content. For example, the alt attribute of the HTML <img> element is used to insert a text description of the image so that users with visual impairments still can access the image's contents. HTML also offers a longdesc attribute, which enables a lengthy or detailed alternative to the image, as is beneficial for complex images, such as flowcharts.

But making content transform gracefully is often much more than simply labeling or providing a text description of an element. The purpose of accessibility is not to mechanically label every element, but rather to make the substance or meaning of the content available to all users. For example, consider a piano falling from the 12th story down to the street below, an animation that might use 12 frames in Flash. If we were to simply label the piano, the building, and the street, the words "building," "piano," and "street" would appear 12 times (because they are all in every frame). But the substance of the animation is not the repetition of these words; rather, the substance is the scene of a piano falling from a tall building and smashing into the street below. Thus, creating content that transforms gracefully is as much a soft skill as a technical skill; it is a creative process by which content developers consider how a diversity of users and user agents will attempt to access the content, and then ensure that the content is offered in such a way that the attempt is successful.

As an animated and interactive medium, Flash poses challenges to developers implementing accessibility that providers of HTML documents don't face. Assistive devices generally do well with page-or document-based content, where a finite amount of information appears in one place, and the user can dwell on it as long as she or he wants before moving on to the next document or page. HTML content usually falls in this category. But highly dynamic content, which changes quickly and constantly based on user activitysuch as video games, target-based drag-and-drop, pop-up menus, live data, and exploration interactionsis harder to capture in static blocks of text. As this chapter demonstrates, solutions exist, but they often require some creativity and planning.

The Flash Player 6 and higher versions have numerous built-in accessibility features. All static text in Flash is automatically exposed in the Flash Player 6, without any work from the Flash author. Other objects, including buttons, dynamic and input text, movie clips, and the movie as a whole are also exposed by default, though several of these need additional information to be made meaningful.

You can selectively hide any of these objects as well from screen readers, with the exception of static text. Much of this worktagging movie assets for accessibilitytakes place in the Accessibility panel, which lets you name objects, provide short descriptions for them (the equivalent of giving them alt attributes), and provide long descriptions for them (the equivalent of giving them longdesc attributes).

To access an audio representation of Flash content, users must have a screen reader that uses Microsoft Active Accessibility (MSAA). At present, Window-Eyes and JAWS are the readers able to access Flash Player 6 content. Other assistive technologies, such as special input devices, are dependent on the operating system, rather than Flash, and should also work. Tab-enabling buttons and keyboard shortcuts are possible, but not automatic, in Flash.

The recipes in this chapter provide several solutions that you can implement to make movies accessible. But before you start modifying a movie, you should develop an overall strategy about how best to make content accessible. The following list summarizes three different broad approaches to making content used in a Flash movie accessible:

• Expose elements in an existing movie for accessibility. In this approach, the contents of both the regular and accessible versions of the movie come from the same source. The movie itself, and text and objects within it, are exposed to assistive technologies as the movie is played. Although the movie may be optimized in some ways for compatibility with assistive technologies, there is only one movie.

• Create one or more alternate versions of the Flash movie. Attempting to make the movie compatible with screen readers or other assistive technologies is impracticalthe movie's architecture of presentation just doesn't lend itself to the transformation. Instead, a different version of the Flash movie is created, which is built from the ground up to serve these audiences.

• Don't use Flash for accessible content. Flash isn't used at all as a vehicle for accessible content. Instead, accessibility-optimized content is put in HTML or text documents, to which users are directed from the original Flash movie.

Choosing the right strategy depends on a number of factors, including the nature of the content, the user experience you are trying to create, available developer time, and concerns about maintenance. As a rule of thumb, the more the movie experience is page-based (as defined previously), the better it will transform for accessible technologies. Conversely, the more speed is a factorfor example, because the movie plays back quickly like a music video or because it demands fast user interaction, as does a video gamethe less likely it will transform gracefully, no matter what you do in the Accessibility panel.