Please correct documentation on Accessibility and provide assistance

Question

Hi,As per this thread here;  The Adobe documentation on screen reader integration is not correct, has broken links to required assets.More importantly; screen reader integration is currently broken and I have no means to fix it.I have created a bug report here; Bug#4197551 - Screen reader and AccessibilityProperties is not functional with JAWS However, I urgently need Adobe support and input in how to make their plugin play nicely with JAWS screen reader in the way that it did back when the original project was built, tested and released.We currently have no screen reader integration and none of our sight impaired customers are able to use the Flash / Flex applications.Please provide me with support and / or links to documentation that is correct so as to allow our users to access the very many painstakingly coded accessibility hints designed for that purpose.Regards,Gaius

jeromiec83223024 · Accepted Answer

Hi,Did you get that conversation going?Did it keep going?Thanks,GThere's a bug open. The situation is pretty ugly and has to do with sandboxing and process isolation. The screenreaders simply don't have the ability to attach themselves to the process like they used to. If you disable both the Flash Player and Firefox plug-in sandboxes (basically, revert to the state of browser security before 2010), then the screen-readers can gain the necessary visibility to operate. The PPAPI interface in Chrome never supported them. Now that Flash is out of process in Firefox, that's also an additional barrier to the screen reader. So, the current state of affairs is that we have an engineer playing around with JAWS to see if we can at least provide guidance on workarounds for things like Flash and Firefox, but the reality -- particularly with the fact that Flex reached it's end of life in 2008, and the end of extended support in 2013 -- is that it's probably time to look at migrating to an HTML5 solution in order to maximize the accessibility of your content.The unfortunate reality here is that each of the browser vendors would very likely need to supply us with a whole new dedicated set of accessibility APIs in order to get good screen-reader support working in the security context in which browser plug-ins currently reside, and with the general trend of browsers moving to deprecate Flash Player, it seems unlikely that the majority of browser vendors would make heavy investments in new API support at this point in time. I talk to all of these organizations pretty regularly, and I'm pretty sure that the stance would be to migrate to the web platform (e.g. HTML and JavaScript). So, we're continuing to investigate, and we're more than happy to advocate for better accessibility support in Flash, but you're not going to get a resolution in a week or two, and to be perfectly honest, you're going to be much better served at this point by migrating to HTML5 and JavaScript. There is technically a Flex implementation supported by the Apache Foundation, but there's no direct support from Adobe, and we're not going to release any additional changes to Flex that might help here. Plus, the friction involved in running Flash content is simply going to increase on all fronts moving forward.

jeromiec83223024 · Answer

Thanks for the feedback. Offhand, I don't know the state of screenreader support on Win10. I'm not aware of any ongoing complaints or open issues, but I'd have to ask around to get an authoritative status.

It would be helpful to know some specifics, like what browser and versions are in play, and what version of JAWS you're using on Win10, and what versions of Win10 we're talking about. This will help us reproduce the issue faster so that we can debug it.

Tomorrow is the US Thanksgiving holiday followed by a long weekend, so it's unlikely that anyone will be able to look at this before next week (I'm already on vacation). That said, I'll get the bug open to the engineering team and we'll update it as we know more.

URL tested	OS	Browser	Flash	JAWS	Keyboard	Accessibility properties read	Notes
http://www.rte.ie/playerxl	Win 7 - 64	Internet Explorer 11.0.9600.18524	19.0.0.245	18.0.1835	NO - All bar tab intercepted by JAWS, tab only gives first focus. Shift tab non-functional.	Limited feedback - detects search field accessibility
http://www.rte.ie/playerxl	Win 7 - 64	Internet Explorer 11.0.9600.18524	23.0.0.207	18.0.1835	NO - Intercepted by JAWS	NO
http://www.rte.ie/playerxl	Win 7 - 64	Chrome 54.0.2840.99	23.0.0.185	18.0.1835	NO - Intercepted by JAWS	NO
http://www.rte.ie/playerxl	Win 10 - 64	Microsoft Edge 38.14393.0.0	23,0,0,207	18.0.1835	Yes	NO - No notifications whatsoever	Cannot tab from browser into Flash content
http://www.rte.ie/playerxl	Win 10 - 64	Chrome 54.0.2840.99 m	23,0,0,207	18.0.1835	NO - Intercepted by JAWS	NO - No notifications whatsoever	Can tab from browser UI into Flash search field, but no further response
http://www.rte.ie/playerxl	Win 10 - 64	Firefox 48.0.2	23,0,0,207	18.0.1835	Yes	NO - No notifications whatsoever	Unreliable interaction with Flash; selecting new state can lose Flash focus. Flash focus only achieveable through clicking. Arrow keys / tab keys functional, but JAWS is silent - NO ACCESSIBILITY INFORMATION READ.
http://www.rte.ie/playerxl	Win 10 - 64	Opera 41.0.2353.56	18.0.1835	NO - Intercepted by JAWS	NO - No notifications whatsoever	Cannot tab from browser into Flash content

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