Recipe 23.4. Creating Accessible Buttons

Problem

You want to design a movie with accessible buttons.

Solution

Place all meaningful content in the Up and Over frames, and focus them on the button functionality.

Discussion

When designing buttons for accessibility, it is important to bear in mind a handful of easy-to-implement best practices:

• Buttons are automatically accessible in Flash. When in focus, users need only press Enter/Return to activate them.

• Many assistive devices do not recognize Down or Hit states, so do not put vital content in these frames. This guideline also means that you should avoid using invisible buttons in accessible movies.

• Provide meaningful names, such as "Buy now," and avoid context or vision-dependent names, such as "Click here."

• Activate the Auto Label checkbox to cause Flash to name buttons based on the label that appears in the Up frame. Deactivate this feature and provide your own labels if you want custom labels. The Auto Label checkbox is found in the Accessibility panel when nothing on the stage is selected.

• Avoid animating button states.

Remember, rather than choosing between design and accessibility goals, in the event of a conflict, a third option is available, which is to create a special accessibility friendly version of the movie, as discussed in Recipe 23.1.

Another best practice is to establish a tab order for each of the buttons as well as provide keyboard shortcuts for the buttons. These features assist both people using screen readers and people who are limited to the keyboard. Both of these techniques are discussed in Recipe 23.5.

When you use movie clips as buttons, using button events, such as onPress and onRelease, assistive technologies render these as buttons. Thus, the practices outlined in this recipe also apply to movie clips acting as buttons. For more on movie clips acting as buttons, see Recipe 9.1.

See Also

Recipe 9.1, Recipe 23.5