Transforming flash to XML for accessibility evaluations

Abstract

Rich Internet content, such as Flash and DHTML, has been spreading all over the net, since it can provide rich and dynamic Web experiences for the sighted majority. It is obvious that this content is inaccessible for visually impaired people because of its visual richness. For Flash, many efforts have been made to address the issue, such as accessibility guidelines and best practices documents. However, the amount of accessible content has not been increasing in spite of these efforts. One of the severe issues is the lack of tools to create accessible content. Current Web accessibility technologies are built on top of XML-based technology infrastructures. In contrast, there is no foundation for investigating inside of Flash content, since it is distributed in a binary format. This characteristic, has prevented vendors from developing Flash accessibility technologies. In order to address this issue, this paper proposes a method to transform existing Flash content into XML structures. It combines two approaches for accessing the internal structures. One approach is to obtain MSAA output through the Flash Player and the other is to acquire information by injecting ActionScript bridge code into the content. In this paper, we will first give an overview of the accessibility framework for Flash content, and then present our XML transformation and checking method. A prototype of the checker has been implemented, and some preliminary results of accessibility evaluations are discussed. Copyright 2006 ACM.