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2012-02-08 16:00

Will iPhone Flash Applications Be Accessible with VoiceOver?

6 October, 2009 @ 2:21 pm by Lioncourt

This week, Adobe Systems Inc. announced a feature of Flash Professional CS5 which compiles Flash applications into native iPhone ones. According to their FAQ, applications developed in this way are "native" iPhone executables, which would suggest a high likelihood of accessibility in apps which do not rely heavily on graphical interaction. Video games, for instance, are typically inaccessible regardless of the development platform, given their high use of graphical content.

If Flash Professional CS5 apps for the iPhone do follow Apple’s accessibility guidelines, or provide developers with tools to implement the guidelines themselves, this could mean that iPhone and iPod touch users will have better access to software developed with the popular Flash technology than Mac users. As yet, Adobe has failed to provide any access to Flash, or indeed any of their products, on the Mac platform, which does raise concern that they may neglect accessibility in Flash Professional CS5 as well. We are currently running a petition for Flash accessibility on Mac OS X through the end of the year.

It is still too soon to know for certain if Flash applications will be accessible with VoiceOver on the iPhone and iPod touch. As more details are made available, we will pass them along.

Posted in Apple Inc., Development, iPhone, iPods and iTunes, Petitions, Third-Party Products, VoiceOver | 2 Comments »

2 Responses to “Will iPhone Flash Applications Be Accessible with VoiceOver?”

  1. Jake commented:

    I wouldn’t count on having accessibility just because they’re native executables. Native executables simply means they are compiled and do not need a web browser or other client to execute them, it does not mean they will use the iPhone OS’s native Cocoa Touch GUI toolkit. If they do compile to a native set of widgets then it is likely they will be accessible, but given the way flash works (it never interfaces to native widgets at all) this is extremely doubtful. It is more likely this will result in flash apps like those we see on the Windows platform: a native executable of the flash player with a flash app built into it. Even on Windows, this particular type of compiled flash is inaccessible as it uses no native controls and does not have a web browser to expose the content to the screen reader.

    October 6th, 2009 at 2:39 pm
  2. Lioncourt responded:

    Jake,
    You bring up good points, however, based on several comments from various sources, whether or not the Flash applications built in this way will use CocoaTouch controls is quite ambiguous. We’re certainly not holding our breath, especialy given Adobe’s track record. However, the link provided seems to indicate that these are not apps running in a Flash interpreter.

    October 6th, 2009 at 2:52 pm

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