Flash Now (More) Accessible

danox writes "Macromedia has finally incorporated some accessibility features into flash, with their latest version flash MX (note that you pretty much need a flash viewer to see this site). Accessibility nazi Joe Clark on A List Apart has written a pretty good critique of the new features and doesn't give macromedia too much praise. Apart from the fact that macromedia has to do this in order to keep the US government as a customer, its a step forward for flash. Just think, it's now possible to write a plugin that will render flash animations as text."

Thank Goodness!

[oxytocin]

Flash is pretty, but my eyes are really bad and sometimes I'd really like to be able to just see the meat and pass on the sizzle.

Everyone should have the opportunity to experience as pretty a web page as they would like, but at the same time, it really shouldn't stop people from being able to "boil it down" to whatever they want.

Case in point, I've got a big monitor (21") at high-res (1600+) and when a web page has a fixed font height, that I can't even change (smallest to largest in IE), it forces me to switch "ignore font size" on, causing so much of the rest of the page content to break. But at least I can read the text then easily.

But not in Macromedia Flash. This really bugs me, and if it weren't for the PixelTouch Zoom my video card does to allow me to jump in to see the 5pt font someone forced into their tiny flash thing, I'd be locked out of much of the information superhighway -- and I'm not even really blind! Talk about a lock-out!

So having access to the textual content in flash would really make me happy (FWIW, sometimes I'll surf around with my own CSS style sheet which sets all text to one font, lime green, black background, and all the images are grey-scaled and inversed! I like it like that, makes it easy for me to read a lot 10h+!). And forget about the minor fact that the Flash format is inherently Vector-based and so can scale even to my 2048x1536 screen nicely, but how many flash, ahem, "presentations", take advantage of this?

Now, especially with the recent talk about making Flash a "web-standard" alongside HTML (X-html, yeah, I know), this all leads to the final question which comes down to whether Flash is really only suited to emphermal, non-important, content most of which is, or is no better, than advertising crap?

Maybe by opening it up they will transcend the "clicking on pretty pictures" phenomenon known as the web?