Joe Clark: Flash MX: Clarifying the Concept. An in-depth look at the accessibility features of Macromedia’s latest revision of Flash. It makes the point that Section 508 is what is driving these features. Section 508 is a U.S. federal law that, among other things, mandates that all federal web sites meet a minimal set of accessibility guidelines. (Flash 5 met virtually none of them.)
Macromedia has taken serious steps to fix [Flash's] accessibility deficiencies. There’s still a lot that’s missing, but Macromedia is aware of nearly everything that needs to be done and will presumably fix it all. (They have no choice, really, if they want to keep the U.S. government as a customer.)
… That’s the real reason Macromedia is going to all this trouble. It is also true that the company now believes accessibility is the right thing to do for all the usual ethical and business reasons, but the inciting incident was the prospect of permanently losing U.S. government sales.
Furthermore:
As it turns out, accessibility is much more sweeping than it appears on first blush. Two categories of software — programs used to create websites, and browsers — must themselves be accessible. It’s not enough for data (like a .html or .swf file) to be accessible; all the software you use to create, view, browse, or enjoy those files has to be accessible, too. In the Web Accessibility Initiative terminology, this is known as authoring-tool and user-agent accessibility.
I was trying to make this point several months ago during the great CSS-versus-tables debate (see Moral Arguments Aside), but it got lost in the general chaos and confusion and accusations of zealotry. So here is the same point again, from the article, put as simply and unzealously as possible:
It is not widely understood that 508 regulations have been in effect and enforceable since June 21, 2001. They’re not coming down the pike; they’re here already. In practice, there is no actual enforcement; we are living in a kind of grace period. But the requirements eventually will be enforced, and noncompliant products could not be bought by the U.S. government thereafter.
For those who are curious about what constitutes an “authoring tool”, the W3C lays it out for you in the Authoring Tool Accessibility Guidelines 1.0:
The term “authoring tool” refers to the wide range of software used for creating Web content, including:
- Editing tools specifically designed to produce Web content (e.g., WYSIWYG HTML and XML editors);
- Tools that offer the option of saving material in a Web format (e.g., word processors or desktop publishing packages);
- Tools that transform documents into Web formats (e.g., filters to transform desktop publishing formats to HTML);
- Tools that produce multimedia, especially where it is intended for use on the Web (e.g., video production and editing suites, SMIL authoring packages);
- Tools for site management or site publication, including tools that automatically generate Web sites dynamically from a database, on-the-fly conversion tools, and Web site publishing tools;
- Tools for management of layout (e.g., CSS formatting tools).
So that would certainly include Macromedia’s Flash authoring tool, as well as HTML authoring tools like DreamWeaver and FrontPage. Oh, and every weblogging tool on the market, open source, freeware, or commercial.
Here is the W3C’s list of priority 1 checkpoints (”tool must satisfy all these requirements”) for web authoring tools, and how I interpret them to apply to weblogging software:
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