The Flash Accessibility panel (Window > Other Panels > Accessibility) lets you provide accessibility information to screen readers and set accessibility options for individual Flash objects or entire Flash applications.

If you select an object on the Stage, you can make that object accessible and specify options and tab order for the object. For movie clips, you can specify whether child object information is passed to the screen reader (the default when you make an object accessible).

With no objects selected on the Stage, use the Accessibility panel to assign accessibility options for an entire Flash application. You can make the entire application accessible, make child objects accessible, have Flash label objects automatically, and give specific names and descriptions to objects.

All objects in Flash documents must have instance names for you to apply accessibility options to them. Create instance names for objects in the Property inspector. The instance name is used to refer to the object in ActionScript.

The following options are available in the Accessibility panel:

Make Object Accessible

(Default) Instructs Flash Player to pass the accessibility information for an object to a screen reader. When the option is disabled, accessibility information for the object is not passed to screen readers. Disabling this option as you test content for accessibility can be useful because some objects might be extraneous or decorative and making them accessible could produce confusing results in the Screen Reader. You can then apply a name manually to the labeled object, and hide the labeling text by deselecting Make Object Accessible. When Make Object Accessible is disabled, all other controls on the Accessibility panel are disabled.

Make Child Objects Accessible

(Movie clips only; Default) Instructs Flash Player to pass child object information to the screen reader. Disabling this option for a movie clip causes that movie clip to appear as a simple clip in the accessible object tree, even if the clip contains text, buttons, and other objects. All objects in the movie clip are then hidden from the object tree. This option is useful mainly for hiding extraneous objects from screen readers.

Note: If a movie clip is used as a button—it has a button event handler assigned to it, such as onPress or onRelease—the Make Child Objects Accessible option is ignored because buttons are always treated as simple clips, and their children are never examined, except in the case of labels.

Auto Label

Instructs Flash to automatically label objects on the Stage with the text associated with them.

Name

Specifies the object name. Screen readers identify objects by reading these names aloud. When accessible objects don’t have specified names, a screen reader might read a generic word, such as Button, which can be confusing.

Important: Do not confuse object names specified in the Accessibility panel with instance names specified in the Property inspector. Giving an object a name in the Accessibility panel does not give it an instance name.

Description

Lets you enter a description of the object to the screen reader. The screen reader reads this description.

Shortcut

Describes keyboard shortcuts to the user. The screen reader reads the text in this text field. Entering keyboard shortcut text here does not create a keyboard shortcut for the selected object. You must provide ActionScript keyboard handlers to create shortcut keys.

Tab Index (Adobe® Flash® CS3 Professional only)

Creates a tab order in which objects are accessed when the user presses the tab key. The tab index feature works for keyboard navigation through a page, but not for screen reader reading order.

For more information, see the Flash Accessibility web page at www.adobe.com/go/flash_accessibility/.

For a tutorial about accessible content, see Create Accessible Flash Content on the Flash Tutorials page at www.adobe.com/go/learn_fl_tutorials.

For a sample of accessible Flash content, see the Flash Samples page at www.adobe.com/go/learn_fl_samples. Download and decompress the Samples zip file and navigate to the Accessibility\AccessibleApplications folder to access the sample.