OpenLaszlo and Accessibility on SWF runtime

Question

I have been trying to add accessibility features some of my OpenLaszlo applications on the SWF10 runtime. Basically I have been getting nowhere. The screen reader I am using to test, "VoiceOver" on Mac refuses to notice my flash widgets, but does notice other non OpenLaszlo widgets.

I have added these attributes to the canvas element, though I think just the "accessible" attribute would should do the job.

aaactive="true" aaname="MP3 Recorder" accessible="true" focusable="true"

And in the laszlo javascript embed code have set accessible to "true."

I just noticed now when compiling with OL49 that there is a warning message in the console that says "WARNING: This runtime doesn't support accessibility."

That seemed bad, but also unlikely. So I did some research and on this page http://labs.openlaszlo.org/trunk-nightly/docs/developers/architecture.html they say "[accessibility] is only available in the OpenLaszlo targets that run the Flash Player under Internet Explorer."

Well I went off and ran it on Windows XP with IE8 and I get the same error message. When I look at the canvas source code that generates that warning, it merely says that if setting the "accessible" attribute to true fails.

So my question is, what is the status of accessibility in OpenLaszlo (4.9 or above) on the SWF runtime? Does it work?

Justin

Answer 1

ActionScript 3 based runtimes (SWF9, SWF10, SWF11) and Accessibility
The OpenLaszlo JIRA issue LPP-7071 swf9: implement accessibility has been created in September 2008, it doesn't seem like anyone did any work on accessibilty for the ActionScript based runtimes (SWF9, SWF10, ...).

I have checked the ActionScript 3 runtime LzSprite.as source for hints to accessibility, here's what I found:

public function setAccessible(accessible:*) :void {
    trace('LzSprite.setAccessible not yet implemented');
}

That means, there is currently no support for accessibility for SWF10.

Adobe has published a documented titled Best practices for accessibility with Adobe Flex 4, following the approach described in that document accessibility support could be added to the ActionScript 3 kernel, but that would be a community effort.

There is some discussion on the accessibility features of Flash Player 11 and VoiceOver on OS X in the comment section of this Adobe blog post.

Flash 8 & DHTML Runtime
I'm adding some information regarding accessibility support for the SWF8 and DHTML runtime here, although you haven't asked for it. It might be useful for other developers when they find this page.

The OpenLaszlo Wiki page on Accesibility is absolutey outdated, has not been updated since 2006. I remember that much of the work done on accessibility support in the past years has been around JAWS support for Flash 8 and DHTML, but I never worked on any of that.

The 4.2 release notes mention JAWS support for Flash 8 as a new feature:

This release adds accessibility for the JAWS reader to radio boxes, trees, and buttons to the extent that it is supported in the underlying Flash 8 implementation. The 4.2.0.4 release is recommended only for specific applications needing accessibility in Flash 8 and not having the ability to upgrade to the current 4.X release, which contains accessibility support along with many other improvements.

Based on LPP-8248 basis JAWS support has been added to the DHTML runtime as well. But it was only tested with IE7.