Musings of a Trained Monkey: Tag adobe

Accessibility of Applets versus Flex RIAs...

Steve Longdo — Sat, 26 May 2007 18:58:00 +0000

I’ve been doing some research into providing support for section 508 accessibility compliance for a simple file browser available inside a web browser. There really is a dearth of information available on the topic from a software implementation stand point.

Java Applets seem to pay lip service to providing support for accessibility by the addition of tons of code labels that would need to be maintained with each release. Certain activities don’t seem to be supported at all for users with accessibility needs (opening tree nodes for example). The most recent documentation I could find on Applets and Accessibility on Sun’s website is called What’s new in Accessibility and is dated October 30, 2000 clearly Sun took their role as an industry leader in web technology very seriously…back in 2000. (As an aside is referring to a user of an applet as a Robot just a little offensive to anyone besides me?)

Adobe Flex, however, seems to view accessibility as a core issue in the design of their product. So much so that they provide a very simple xml attribute for MXML files (<accessibility>true</accessibility>) to turn on a host of accessibility features. This requires almost no extra effort on the part of a software developer. There are a small number of caveats to their support, but they have taken the steps to detail them and best practices for accessibility on their site including a functional understanding of how Flex works with JAWS and Braille screen technologies. Adobe even maintains a current website dedicated to the accessibility of their products.

Adobe Flex opens up...

Steve Longdo — Thu, 26 Apr 2007 20:22:00 +0000

This looks to be some exciting news from Adobe about open sourcing Flex. Flex is a developer oriented way of working with Flash. I had the good fortune to work with it back in the Macromedia days when it was still a beta product.

Flex facilitates the creation of a superior user experience on the web. It is my belief the expen$ive licensing terms for the technology was always the barrier to larger adoption. Get ready for a flood of better looking, more functional web applications in the next few months. I know I will be adding Flex into my open source toolbox.

Adobe Flex2 is out...

Steve Longdo — Wed, 28 Jun 2006 15:58:00 +0000

Apparently Adobe Flex2 is available for download today.

When Adobe first announced Flex 2 last fall, it said that it would make the core software development kit (SDK), which provides the core programmer tooling without the bells and whistles of a visual IDE, available for free. The SDK just released includes the framework itself, compiler, documentation, and a command line debugger.

It would be great to be able to use the free SDK compiler to make a simple AJAX driven 3D pie-chart not unlike the ones in Google Analytics. Adobe even provides an open source Flash-Ajax bridge project for linking AJAX activity to a swf file.

Has someone already done this or am I ahead of the curve?