MACROMEDIA DIRECTOR MX-USING DIRECTOR MX, Use Manual

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CHAPTER 23
Making Director Movies Accessible
As a Macromedia Director MX author, you might want to provide ways for computer users with
disabilities to experience the movies that you create. Director includes accessibility features that
let you do this. By using these features, you can make existing and new movies accessible to users
who have hearing, visual, or mobility impairment.
With Lingo and behaviors, you can add text-to-speech capability to your movies. This lets visually
impaired users hear the text in your movie read aloud by the computer. You can provide
captioning to help users with hearing impairment experience the audio portions of your movies.
Finally, you can enable your movies to be navigated with the keyboard instead of a mouse, which
benefits users with certain kinds of mobility impairment.
If you work on projects sponsored by the U.S. government, you might be required to follow
government guidelines for providing accessibility to disabled users.
You add accessibility to your Director movies by using the included accessibility behaviors or
special Lingo commands. The text-to-speech behaviors and Lingo require the Speech Xtra. If you
use text-to-speech in your movie, you need to add the Speech Xtra to your movie’s Xtra list. This
is discussed in detail in this chapter.
About government requirements
The U.S. government has stated that multimedia created for the purpose of fulfilling a
government contract must be made accessible to computer users with disabilities. The
government requirements include text-to-speech for the visually impaired, captioning for the
hearing impaired, and keyboard navigation for the mobility impaired.
The full text of the government requirements is available at www.section508.gov/.
Making Director movies accessible
You can make your Director movies accessible by adding behaviors or writing custom Lingo
scripts. Director includes several behaviors that let you easily add text-to-speech, captioning, and
keyboard navigation to your movies with simple drag-and-drop procedures. If you want to have
more control over how you implement accessibility in your movies, you can write custom Lingo
scripts that use the text-to-speech commands. For more information about text-to-speech Lingo,
see “Using accessibility Lingo” on page 559.