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USING FLASH CS4 PROFESSIONAL
Creating accessible content
3
Select Make Movie Accessible (the default setting) to expose the document to screen readers.
4
Select or deselect Make Children Accessible to expose or omit any accessible objects in the document to screen
readers.
5
If you selected Make Movie Accessible in step 2, enter a name and description for the document as needed.
6
Select Auto Label (the default setting) to use text objects as automatic labels for accessible buttons or input text
fields contained in the document. Deselect this option to turn off automatic labeling and expose text objects to
screen readers as text objects.
Viewing and creating tab order and reading order
The two aspects to tab indexing order are the
tab order
in which a user navigates through the web content and the order
in which things are read by the screen reader, called the
reading order
.
Flash Player uses a tab index order from left to right and top to bottom. Customize both the tab and reading order by
using the
tabIndex
property in ActionScript (in ActionScript, the
tabIndex
property is synonymous with the reading
order).
Note:
Flash Player no longer requires that you add all of the objects in a FLA file to a list of tab index values. Even if you
do not specify a tab index for all objects, a screen reader reads each object correctly.
Tab order
The order in which objects receive input focus when users press the Tab key. Use ActionScript to create the
tab order, or if you have Adobe®
Flash®
CS4
Professional, use the Accessibility panel. The tab index that you assign in
the Accessibility panel does not necessarily control the reading order.
Reading order
The order in which a screen reader reads information about the object. To create a reading order, use
ActionScript to assign a tab index to every instance. Create a tab-order index for every accessible object, not just the
focusable objects. For example, dynamic text must have tab indexes, even though a user cannot tab to dynamic text. If
you do not create a tab index for every accessible object in a given frame, Flash Player ignores all tab indexes for that
frame whenever a screen reader is present, and uses the default tab ordering instead.
See also
“
Use ActionScript to create a tab order for accessible objects
” on page 314
Create a tab-order index for keyboard navigation in the Accessibility panel
You can create a custom tab-order index in the Accessibility panel for keyboard navigation for the following objects:
•
Dynamic text
•
Input text
•
Buttons
•
Movie clips, including compiled movie clips
•
Components
•
Screens
Note:
You can also use ActionScript code to create a tab-order index for keyboard navigation.
Tab focus occurs in numerical order, starting from the lowest index number. After tab focus reaches the highest tab
index, focus returns to the lowest index number.
Updated 5 March 2009