The Flash Accessibility panel

One way to provide accessibility information to screen readers is to use the Flash Accessibility panel. The alternate approach is to enter accessibility information using ActionScript. See Creating accessibility with ActionScript.

The Accessibility panel is a self-contained property inspector that lets you set accessibility options for individual Flash objects or entire Flash applications.

If you select an object on the Stage, you can make that object accessible and then specify options such as a name, description, keyboard shortcut, and tab index order (Flash Professional only) for the object. For movie clips, you can specify whether child object information is passed to the screen reader (this option is selected by default when you make an object accessible).

With no objects selected on the Stage, you use the Accessibility panel to assign accessibility options for an entire Flash application. You can make the entire application accessible, make child objects accessible, have Flash label objects automatically, and give specific names and descriptions to objects

All objects in Flash documents must have instance names in order for you to apply accessibility options to them. You create instance names for objects in the Property inspector. The instance name is used to refer to the object in ActionScript.

To open the Accessibility panel:

Select Window > Other Panels > Accessibility.
Select from the available options:
Make Object Accessible instructs Flash Player to pass the accessibility information for an object to a screen reader. This option is selected by default; when the option is disabled, accessibility information for the object is not passed to screen readers. You might find it useful to disable this option as you test content for accessibility because some objects may be extraneous or decorative and making them accessible could produce confusing results in the Screen Reader. You can then apply a name manually to the labeled object, and hide the labeling text by unselecting Make Object Accessible. When Make Object Accessible is disabled, all other controls on the Accessibility panel are disabled.

Make Child Objects Accessible instructs Flash Player passes child object information to the screen reader. This option is for movie clips only and is selected by default. When it is enabled, Disabling this option for a movie clip causes that movie clip to appear as a simple clip in the accessible object tree, even if the clip contains text, buttons, and other objects. All objects within the movie clip are then hidden from the object tree. Like the Make Object Accessible option, this option is useful mainly for hiding extraneous objects from screen readers.

Note: If a movie clip is used as a button, meaning that it has a button event handler assigned to it, such as onPress or onRelease, the Make Child Objects Accessible option is ignored because buttons are always treated as simple clips, and their children are never examined, except in the case of labels.

Auto Label instructs Flash to automatically label objects on the Stage with the text associated with them. See You can use the Accessibility panel to assign names to buttons and input text fields so that they are identified appropriately by the screen reader. There are two ways of doing this:.

Name specifies the object name. Screen readers identify objects by reading these names aloud. When accessible objects don't have specified names, a screen reader might read a generic word, such as Button, which can be confusing.

Caution: Do not confuse object names specified in the Accessibility panel with instance names specified in the Property inspector.

Description lets you enter a description of the object to the screen reader. This description is read by the screen reader.

Shortcut is used to describe keyboard shortcuts to the users. The text entered in this text box is read by the screen reader. Entering keyboard shortcut text here does not create a keyboard shortcut for the selected object. You must provide ActionScript keyboard handlers in order to create shortcut keys. For more information, see Creating a keyboard shortcut.

Tab Index (Flash Professional only) creates a tab order in which objects are accessed when the user presses the tab key. The tab index feature works for keyboard navigation through a page, but not for screen reader reading order. For information on how to use this field, see Creating a tab order index for keyboard navigation in the Accessibility panel (Flash Professional only).