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About screen reader technology

The Flash Player communicates with screen reader software to provide information on the visual content of a Flash movie. The screen reader in turn generates a spoken audio description of the contents of the screen.

Different screen reader applications use different methods for translating information into speech, so you can't know exactly how your movie will be presented to each user. For the simple Flash movie below, the accompanying text is one possible audio version of the movie that a screen reader might present:

Possible screen reader version:"Electronic registration card. Text field name. Text field address. Button send."

From this version, a user can understand what the movie contains. The screen reader software probably provides a keyboard option for pressing the button (for example, the user might use the Tab key to advance through the objects in the movie, as the screen reader describes them, and use the Enter key to press the button).

Note: In this example, the screen reader software enables keyboard access to the button. No special keyboard scripting is required in the Flash movie to support this kind of interaction.

Screen readers are complicated applications. This example shows only a simple introduction to screen reader capabilities. But these basics are all you need to know about screen readers in order to create Flash movies that will work well with screen readers.