Yahoo! Flash (R) Blog

Accessible = true;
Flash and Flex Accessibility Docs

Adobe just released a draft of some new documentation for accessibility in Flash and Flex. While this doesn’t mean that the way accessibility is used has changed, it does show that they’re being more open in its usage. This is big news for component developers like ourselves. Basically, it means that there is now an official recommendation and best practice for implementing accessibility in custom components.

Summary of What’s Changed:

• AccessibilityImplementation is documented for the first time
• The Accessibility class is more fully documented
• Everything under the mx.accessibility.* package is documented
• Examples for accessibility implementations are now available

The main class to look at for Flash development is flash.accessibility.AccessibilityImplementation.

For Flex, the main point of reference would be mx.accessibility.AccImpl (which, in turn, uses AccessibilityImplementation). Flex component developers can look at the documentation or source code for the accessibility implementations of the standard Flex components, which all extend this AccImpl class. (For instance, mx.controls.Button uses a class called mx.accessibility.ButtonAccImpl, while mx.containers.Panel uses mx.accessibility.PanelAccImpl to enable its accessibility.)

If you’ve been browsing the source code for Flex components, you may already be familiar with these classes. You may have also noticed the lack of documentation in the source code. That should change in an upcoming release. As for now, you can stay ahead of the curve by checking out this draft.

Find conversations: bloglines | technorati

Share: on Yahoo! My Web | on del.icio.us | digg it! | reddit!