About animation and accessibility for the visually impaired

In some situations, you may want to change the property of an accessible object during the course of movie playback. For example, you may want to indicate changes that take place on a keyframe in an animation.

To update properties for an accessible object:

Display the frame in which you want to change the properties.
Do one of the following:
- Select Window > Property inspector if the inspector is not visible. In the Property inspector, click the Accessibility button.
- Select Window > Other Panels > Accessibility.
In the Accessibility panel, change the properties for the object as needed.

Alternatively, you can use ActionScript to update accessibility properties. See Creating accessibility with ActionScript.

Different screen readers treat new objects on frames differently. Some screen readers may read only the new object. Some screen readers may re-read the entire document.

Try to avoid animating the text, buttons, and input text fields in your document. If you keep these kinds of objects stable, you reduce the chance of causing a screen reader to emit extra "chatter" that may annoy users. Also, it's best to avoid making your Flash content loop.

If you're using a feature like Text Break Apart to animate text, Flash Player can't determine the actual text content of that text. Other examples of information-carrying graphics include icons and gestural animations. You can remedy problems like this by providing names or descriptions for certain accessible objects within your document, or for the entire Flash application. See Making an entire Flash application accessible. You can also add supplementary text into your document, or shift important content from graphics to text.