Use High Contrast
AAPL256.83  chart+4.66
2010-09-03 12:26

Petition to Adobe Systems Inc. for a COmmitment to Accessibility

25 August, 2009 @ 11:30 am by Lioncourt

One of the most frequently asked questions by VoiceOver users is some variation on, "When will we have access to Flash?" The answer has been, as far as we have been able to determine, that Adobe Systems Inc. has no plans to provide accessibility in Flash, or any of their other products for that matter, on the Mac OS X platform, citing a perceived lack of Mac users who would benefit from such accessibility.

Given the exponentially growing community of blind and visually impaired Mac OS X users, this statement is clearly unfounded. In a constructive attempt to make our voices heard, the Mac-cessibility Network is running its first petition. The ultimate goal of this effort is to obtain a commitment to, and implementation of, accessibility in Adobe’s Flash platform on the Mac OS X operating system, including support for the VoiceOver screen reading solution provided therein.

If you believe mainstream companies like Adobe should be offering accessibility in their products, as we do, we hope you will take just a moment to read and sign our Adobe Petition for Commitment to Action.

We plan on running this petition through the end of December. In January, we will present the petition to Adobe Systems Inc.

We also would encourage you to help spread the word to others, and ask them to sign the petition. For easy reference, the link to the petition is http://maccessibility.net/petition

We thank you for your support in this effort.

Posted in Apple Inc., Community, Mac OS X, Petitions, Site News, Third-Party Products, VoiceOver | 9 Comments »

9 Responses to “Petition to Adobe Systems Inc. for a COmmitment to Accessibility”

  1. awk stated:

    Josh,
    I’m pleased that you are doing this – we’ll be interested in seeing the results. Please make sure to include me on the final delivery.
    Andrew Kirkpatrick
    Sr. Product Manager, Adobe Accessibility

    August 25th, 2009 at 12:03 pm
  2. ecardoshinsky remarked:

    Having worked with Macromedia, back when they were still Macromedia, on implementing support for their “Accessible Flash” architecture in a product we were working on, I can tell you, even if they did implement a solution for Flash on Mac OS, it would be just as inept as it is in Windows. Meaning virtually useless for anything dealing with dynamic content, etc, you know, the types of things you use flash for to begin with.

    So,

    Q: How does Macromedia (Adobe) achieve accessibility on the windows platform.

    A: Technically it doesn’t achieve accessibility in windows, but more specifically through the browser’s Shockwave plugin through MSAA (Microsoft Active Accessibiltiy). In theory, any borwser that is MSAA enabled should work, however, in reality, since MSAA is achieved differently on different browsers there is no real consistency in behavior between the two major browsers (Internet Explorer and Firefox).

    What this means, is that in order to use, develop, or test applicaitons for accessibility with JAWS and/or Window-Eyes, everything has to be done through the browser plugin. So when I was writing Flash test cases, I couldn’t even test them in the authoring tools test player because it didn’t run in a browser content area. Very inconvenient.

    When it comes down to it, Windows screen readers treat Flash content as if it is a document that you can tab through if there are tabbable objects. Meaning it can take quite a bit of time to find anything and when you do, if something is automatically updated (which is often the case) as a result of an action taken, the user is not informaed or not aware that anything has happened, thus causing a user to become disoriented or just lost. JAWS, IMO has the best Flash implementation, it’s a single checkbox that is labeled “Ignore Flash content in web pages”. Some may argue that there is an alternate framework called Flex, which can be used to build accessbile interfaces. Ok, but in spite of that, Flex applicaitons still run in the shockwave plugin of an MSAA compliant browser and regardless of the framework, still exhibit the same inaccessible behavior. Basically, there isn’t much demand be Windows users for FLash accessibility anyway. It would take a complete re-work of their architecture just for the Mac OS, and I honestly wouldn’t trust them to do it right.

    So, then what?

    There are a couple of options once you look at what sorts of things that use the shockwave plugin that people actually care about (Aside from stupid ads). You will typically have, movies, restaurant menus, audio embedded playlists and Some really interactive sites that rely completely on Flash. Only the latter fails to have a real solution other then marketing groups to have more sense and be more conscious of issues for people who can’t see the screen or have difficulty doing so. But the latter is kind of a moot point anyway, if they haven’t thought there website strategy through to include people with visual imparements, then they definately aren’t going to make their flash site accessible. At least this has been my experience.

    For the other situations, the answer could lie in Apple’s court to address. Since there is a lot of A/V conent played within the Schockwave plugin, why not just force Safari to ignore the code to use the plugin and bypass it to use a QT X plugin which is more likely to be accessible?

    Fortunately, Apple has seemed to jump on the HTML 5 wagon which includes the element which could be used for that very reason.

    Now, for Adobe PDF, on Window’s systems it is necessary for the sccreen readers to use their virtual PC cursors (VPC) essentially accessing a PDF in the same way they access web content. This requires a Tag structure that can be accessed by ATs for this reason. VO has no Virtual PC cursor, therefore doesn’t really need the tagged structure of a PDF to read it, which is why you can use Apple Preview to read PDFs just fine. Other aspects such as alternative text for images do still need to be addressed by the original author, but that isn’t out of the question. Where Adobe does lack is on the Authoring of PDF files using Acrobat Professional, but they lack in that area on Windows as well.

    Anyway, just wanted to offer a bit of unique perspective with the years I’ve had dealing with the two entities, even back when they were still considered 2 separate entities.

    August 25th, 2009 at 12:15 pm
  3. MJ wrote:

    Hmm, so in simple terms, we should give up all hope? nope, not me. I’m planning on shipping this link around the web, already have got 3 people to sign. going to email RNIB here in the uK to see if they’d be interesting signing. If we sit back and do nothing, nothing will ever be achieved. Thanks for starting this petition and count on my help. :)

    August 25th, 2009 at 12:52 pm
  4. bertp001 remarked:

    Good idea.

    August 25th, 2009 at 1:16 pm
  5. ecardoshinsky articulated:

    MJ, as I pointed out, there is hope with emerging technologies as well as implementations on Apple’s side of things that would make any dependencies on technologies that require a “petitioned” implementation moot. You shouldn’t have to get people to sign a petition for a company like Adobe to develop there accessibility platform and look to future technologies and better implementations such as Apple’s accessibility architecture. Point is, other organizations are moving to different technologies that are better equipped, for instance, google web apps using WAI ARIA support to enable Web 2.0 interfaces for accessibility, etc. There is plenty of forward thinking potential that is not requiring petitioned implementation. This is simply a perspective from my several years as an AT specialist and consultant for Accessibility.

    Eddie Cardoshinsky
    AT-Specialist/Technical Consultant IBM Human Abilities and Accessibility Center

    August 25th, 2009 at 1:56 pm
  6. Lioncourt observed:

    ecardoshinsky,
    While I agree that emerging technologies have the potential to provide a much better experience overall, Flash isn’t going to vanish over night, and it is a technology that is very widely used. While this petition focuses on Flash, it also makes mention of Adobe’s lack of accessibility in its other products as well. Flash just happens to be the one technology that causes the largest number of problems for the greatest number of users. Your argument seems to be that we should just ignore the problem and hope it goes away in light of HTML 5, etc. I do not believe that is the best course of action, particularly where regards such a widely use technology. CSS was supposed to have replaced HTML tables for page layout on the web some ten years ago, and yet a huge number of sites still rely on HTML tables to get this done instead.

    August 25th, 2009 at 2:09 pm
  7. atmac stated:

    There’s something wrong with your CSS – each comment’s text is smaller than the last one :(

    August 25th, 2009 at 7:56 pm
  8. Lioncourt commented:

    ATMac: Thanks for the heads up. We fixed the problem with the comment sizes shrinking. :)

    August 25th, 2009 at 9:49 pm
  9. ecardoshinsky asserted:

    Hi, this is to everyone and especially Andrew Kirkpatrick, Sr. Product Manager, Adobe Accessibility. My posts above were posts of my own opinion and were in no way representative of IBM’s relationship or status withe Adobe Systems concerning accessiblity of FLash/FLex and other Adobe technologies. My apologies if it seems as though I was speaking for IBM, I most certainly was not, inclusion of IBM in my post was a mistake and I shouldn’t have added it and kept it as my own personal views.

    Again, my sincerest apologies to Mr. Kirkpatrick and others who have read these comments for this misunderstanding.

    Eddie Cardoshinsky

    August 27th, 2009 at 9:17 am

Post a Response

You must be logged in to post a comment.