Making components accessible

A growing requirement for web content is that it should be accessible to people who have disabilities. Visually impaired people can use visual content in Flash applications by means of screen reader software, which provides an audio description of the material on the screen.

Flash MX 2004 includes the following accessibility features:

• Custom focus navigation
• Custom keyboard shortcuts
• Screen-based documents and the screen authoring environment
• The Accessibility class

When you create a component, you can include ActionScript that enables the component and a screen reader to communicate. Then, when developers use your component to build an application in Flash, they use the Accessibility panel to configure each component instance.

Add the following line to your component's FLA file, in the same layer that you add other ActionScript calls:

mx.accessibility.ComponentName.enableAccessibility();

For example, the following line enables accessibility for the MyButton component:

mx.accessibility.MyButton.enableAccessibility();

When developers add the MyButton component to an application, they can use the Accessibility panel to make it accessible to screen readers.

For information on the Accessibility panel and other features of Flash, see Creating Accessible Content.