Some users can’t see, hear, or move, or have difficulties in reading, recognizing colors, or other disabilities. The World Wide Web Consortium has published a document called Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0, which contains guidelines for making web content available for people with disabilities.
Microsoft Active Accessibility (MSAA) technology and its successor, the UI Automation (UIA) interface, are also aimed at helping such users. Adobe Flex components were designed to help developers in creating accessible applications.
Did you know that blind users of your RIA mostly use the keyboard as opposed to the mouse? They may interact with your application using special screen readers (e.g., JAWS from Freedom Scientific) or need to hear special audio signals that help them in application navigation.
A screen reader is a software application that tries to identify what’s being displayed on the screen, and then reads it to the user either by text-to-speech converters or via a Braille output device.
The computer mouse is unpopular not only among blind people, but also among people with mobility impairments. Are all of the Flex components used in your application accessible by the keyboard?
If your application includes audio, hearing-impaired people would greatly appreciate captions. This does not mean that from now on every user should be forced to watch captions during audio or hear loud announcements of the components that are being displayed on the monitor. But you should provide a way to switch your Flex application into accessibility mode. The Flex compiler offers a special option—compiler.accessible—to build an accessible .swf.
You can find more materials about Flex accessibility at http://www.adobe.com/accessibility/products/flex/.
For testing accessibility of your RIA by visually impaired people, use aDesigner, a disability simulator from IBM. aDesigner supports Flash content and is available at http://www.eclipse.org/actf/downloads/tools/aDesigner/index.php.
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