Macromedia Flash Player 6 makes content generated in previous versions of Macromedia Flash available. Text elements and buttons in movies created in Macromedia Flash 4 and Macromedia Flash 5 are made available to the screen reader without modification.
To help designers and developers create accessible Macromedia Flash content, a new Accessibility Panel has been added to the Macromedia Flash MX authoring tool (version 6). This new panel allows text equivalents to be specified for elements of Macromedia Flash movies and provides control over how the screen reader handles these objects.
To access Macromedia Flash content using a screen reader, users need to download the new Macromedia Flash Player 6. Users also need a screen reader that integrates the Macromedia Flash Player implementation of MSAA (Microsoft Active Accessability). The first of these screen readers is Window-Eyes from GW Micro. Users of screen readers must also use the Microsoft Internet Explorer browser as this is the only browser with support for MSAA.
In most instances there is little apparent difference between HTML content and Macromedia Flash content (although Windows-Eyes announces Flash content by saying 'has Flash'), but there are still some significant differences between the two. Whereas an HTML page generally remains static once it has loaded, Macromedia Flash content may remain active over time. If a Macromedia Flash movie changes after the screen reader has read it, then Macromedia Flash Player notifies the screen reader. This notification causes the screen reader to return to the top of the page and begin reading the page again. So the MSAA buffer may refresh numerous times in order to catch up with any changes that may be taking place. Macromedia Flash content that has not been designed with accessibility in mind may change constantly. Consequently, the screen reader will return to the top of the page repeatedly, making the page very difficult to use. To address this issue, a new keystroke (Alt + Shift + M) called "halt Macromedia Flash events" has been added to Window-Eyes. This keystroke allows a screen reader user to suspend Macromedia Flash notifications on the page. Pressing the keystroke again allows the user to resume Macromedia Flash notifications.
The Macromedia Flash Player 6 Does not guarantee accessible content, but it is a move in the right direction. Of course accessible content is still not usable content. For example "eye-candy" movies created prior to Flash 6 (without overall text equivalent for the entire movie) will not provide much useful information to screen readers. However, Macromedia promises to give a lot of attention to the research and promotion of usable accessible content. Further advances in the Flash Player and some extra attention on accessibility from Flash authors are needed to bring Macromedia Flash movies to a valuable accessibility level.