Yahoo! Flash (R) Blog

Flash 10 Experiments: The Warholizer (Loading and Processing Local Images)

One of the new features in Flash Player 10 is the ability to read local files. We’ve been looking at this feature for some of our upcoming components, and built a small example that demonstrates how to load, display, and process local images.  This example, dubbed “The Warholizer”, allows you to open any image file on your machine, and without uploading it to the server, extract the image’s bitmap data, and run it through some color filters, achieving an effect not unlike the one in some of Andy Warhol’s work. Try it out by dropping in a photo of your own for those 15 minutes of fame (though make sure the image is not too large: Flash has an upper limit on the size of bitmaps):

The code for the example is below the fold.

Continue reading Flash 10 Experiments: The Warholizer (Loading and Processing Local Images)…

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ASTRA Holiday Edition

It’s that time of year again. A time when spirits are high, and an unmistakable sense of well-being enters your heart. A time when a peaceful stillness fills the air, and carols can be heard, sung merrily in the distance.

That’s right, it’s time for an ASTRA bug release! Oh, for joy!

The Flash Platform team worked overtime on this one. Heck, we could even be seen on Thanksgiving, hacking code in between bites of Grandma’s pumpkin pie. We did everything we could to fix things that needed fixing, and add things that needed adding. And so, without further ado, we present to you, ASTRA 1.3.1.

Fixes and feature enhancements:

AlertManager
o   Added support for styling.

AudioPlayback:
o   Bug fix: scrubber would not work properly while large file downloads.

AutoComplete:
o   Bug fix: Fixed bug with ASTRA layout containers.
o   Made itemToLabel function public.

Menu:
o   Added support for styling.
o   Added accessibility placeholders.
o   Bug fix: Fixed bug with MenuEvent not sending out appropriate menu property.

MenuBar:
o   Added support for styling.
o   Bug fix: Fixed bug in which LivePreview was not showing properly in CS4 when component was dragged to stage.

Tree:
o   Bug fix: Fixed index overrun bug.
o   Bug fix: Fixed shifting selected item when opening and closing.

So grab a glass of eggnog and sit by the fire, and pick up the new ASTRA.

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Creating Accessible Components in Flash and Flex

It’s been in the works for a while, but I finally had the chance to focus on making ASTRA components more accessible. Accessibility is not something many developers look at, but it’s slowly gaining ground. For many developers, even figuring out how to enable the built-in accessibility of Flash components is a job. But when you create custom components, implementing accessibility is another job entirely. Accessibility doesn’t come for free.

To begin my assessment of ASTRA components, I first had to learn to use a screen reader. I installed a trial of JAWS for Windows, which is the de facto screen reader technology, especially in regards to Flash. It’s important to note that although I develop on a Mac, I have to use Windows for accessibility testing. This is because Flash accessibility is based on Microsoft’s Active Accessibility standards, and only work on Windows machines. It can be argued that real accessibility is quite limited on the Mac, so this is more of an OS X limitation than a limitation of Flash. I also installed the Flex scripts add-ons, which are touted to provide more fine-grained info for the screen reader when using accessible Flex components.

Using  a screen reader, I quickly discovered, is a more involved process than it might seem. Your natural tendencies and habits have to be thrown out the window. For example, opening a browser window with an embedded swf, my first inclination was to use the mouse to navigate to a text input control and start typing. That didn’t work as planned. For one, a typical user of a screen reader is not going to be grabbing the mouse first thing, but using keyboard navigation to interact with an application, so I’d already cheated. Along with this, because of the way JAWS works, navigating to an input field won’t necessarily allow you to begin editing text–you must enter into “forms mode” in order to even start typing.

Once I got the basics of using JAWS down, I started to test our components. My original assumption was that the components would “mostly work” because many of them are based on lower-level components which have accessibility implementations built.

I was “mostly wrong.” A component is not the sum of its parts, in regards to a screen reader. For a component to be successfully understood by the user, it needs its own accessibility implementation built from scratch.

In the next article I’ll discuss what steps I took to create those implementations.

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