Articulate’s Engage software is a quick and polished way to create eLearning interactions. Unfortunaltey, it’s also built from the ground up in AS2.
So while the Engage content SWFs can be loaded into an AS3 container, you definitely can’t use images in your Engage content because the XML onLoad event fails to fire when AS2 content is loaded into an AS3 container.
I used ‘Charles‘ to see what HTTP requests were being sent and noticed that:
- When browsing directly to the Engage SWF a GET request for the image is sent immediately after the Engage content XML is loaded; and
- When browsing the Engage content after it’s loaded into my AS3 container the GET request for the image is never sent.
While it’s not cast-iron proof I think it’s safe to assume that an ‘onLoad’ event for the XML might not be firing, so the Engage SWF hangs, waiting for confirmation that never comes.
While it’s not completely crippled (text-only interactions are just fine) this reduces the usefulness of Engage content in any Flash environment that’s been built in the last few years.
November 13th, 2009
My first serious exposure to Flash and accessibility was in 2004. One of my problems then was my understanding of accessibility. That’s improved a little, but the landscape changes (along with Flash and Actionscript) and since then I still haven’t found a solution that lets me produce ‘accessible’ content with the same effort as my usually inaccessible work.
While I don’t have anything I’d call a ‘complete solution’ I’ve used a number of partial solutions along the way:
- providing an onscreen link to an HTML-only version of the interactive content. This is never a straight copy of the text content. It’s a re-write of the interactive content as though it were an article, delivering the intended message without any audio, video, animation, images or colour. It’s the quickest way I’ve found to give a version of the content that’s accessible to the maximum number of assistive technologies with the minimum of production effort (and cost to the client);
- providing Flash content that is visible to MSAA enabled assistive technologies (like the JAWS screen reader) and also ‘wired up’ for keyboard navigation; and
- customised captioning combined with keyboard navigation, like this example (from 2004) to provide content accessible to hearing-impaired users and keyboard-only users.
AFAIK, obstacles that still stand in the way of convenient production of accessible content in Flash include:
- Flash still isn’t happy talking to Apple’s assistive technology. We can still only rely on MSAA as a technology bridge between the Flash Player and the real world (in this case, Microsoft’s real world);
- The vast number of impairments and their relevant assistive technologies. As well as additional development time it presents a massive overhead in testing. I’ve never yet been able to successfully justify the additional cost of purchasing the most basic assistive technologies (JAWS, a workstation to test on) to any employer.
So where to from here? I need to assume that there won’t usually be the budget or resources for producing multiple versions of the content, so I think the majority of my clients (Australian, so our legislative requirements aren’t yet as stringent as the US) would be happy with keyboard and screenreader accessibility.
For static content that’s fine, but interactions (beyond standard component-based radio-button and checkbox interactions) will need to be designed and coded quite differently, or ignored altogether.
If you’ve read this far you might already have pragmatic solutions to these problems – what are you doing about them?
October 23rd, 2009
Don’t waste that extra hour wondering why your embedded Flash fonts aren’t working… Make sure your ’setTextFormat’ happen AFTER the text has been applied (via htmlText, or CSS, or inline font selection)
July 28th, 2009
Jobe Makar has a nice little utility to do the finger-numbing basics of class conversion from AS2 to AS3. Get it here
April 17th, 2009
I was getting an error trying to use the Flex ANT tasks. Trawling the interwebs revealed I should configure my FLEX_HOME and SRC_DIR properties correctly but the missing piece of the puzzle came from my esteemed colleague Kristen…
<taskdef resource=”flexTasks.tasks” />
When I included this line in the same ANT file as the <mxmlc> task everything worked as intended. And now that I know what to look for (sigh) I’ll point you to these step-by-step instructions!
March 26th, 2009
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