Dynamic Flash

Yesterday, Adobe released Flash Player 9 Update 3 Beta 2, which (aside from a ridiculously convoluted name) has caused much furore in the industry.

With the big headline feature of the beta dominating the blogosphere - that’ll be native HD-video playback via H.264 support, in case you’ve been hiding under a rock - you’d be forgiven for thinking that this was the only feature added to this release. In fact, there were several less glamourous features listed in the release notes that passed pretty much uncommented, including support for Flex framework caching and full-screen support on Linux.

One of these less-publicised features is that Flash Player 9 for plugin-based browsers on Windows, which includes Firefox, Opera and Safari 3, now supports the Microsoft Active Accessibility (MSAA) layer, which means that properly-authored Flash content should now be accessibly to screen reader users on Windows regardless of which web browser they choose to use. Support for MSAA in Internet Explorer has been included since Flash Player 6.0r65, so it’s nice to see support now being added across all supported web browsers on Windows.

This isn’t a panacea for all Flash’s accessibility ills - the Flash Player is still lacking support for accessibility layers on other platforms, for example - but, when coupled with the ability to get video subtitles included in the H.264 feature, it is an encouraging step in the right direction for Adobe.

Yahoo Europe’s web standards evangelist-in-chief Christian Heilmann is heading into unchartered territory - he’s going to give a presentation to a bunch of professional Flashers at Flashforum Konferenz 2007 in Cologne in September he’s calling Emancipated JavaScript and the Coming Out of the Flash community.

JavaScript developers discarded the stigmata of the “move stuff around, require certain browser settings and pop things up” days of DHTML and embraced Dom Scripting and later on Ajax taking over the web application world by storm. By now having JavaScript as an interest on your CV does not get you a confused shake of the head but is actually sought after by headhunters.

There are a lot of parallels in the misunderstandings of JavaScript as a technology in the past and those that keep Flash from being a mainstream developer technology and I will try to show them and offer options to set these straight.

For me, Christian has hit the nail on the head. I’m proud to be a Flash developer at Yahoo!, and I have the respect of all my web-standards-loving coworkers because they *really get* that Flash is a tool that, used properly, can really enhance the user’s experience. Christian’s aim is to help other Flashers around the world to “come out” and convince their standardista colleagues that Flash is not always evil. He’s also a great public speaker, so if you get the chance to go along then I’d recommend you check out Christian’s talk.

Niqui Merret has compiled a great list of Flash accessibility related issues on her blog. Some of these issues have clunky workarounds - like not using the wmode setting (I did say clunky) - so if you’re creating or using Flash content, be sure to check out this list to make sure you’re not unintentionally harming the accessibility of your project.

The only thing I have to add to this list is that Firefox support for MSAA on Windows appears to be coming in the next beta version of the Flash Player 9, based on Emmy Huang’s post on Flash Player 9 Update 3 Beta.

Oh, and if you feel strongly enough about any of the accessibility issues, don’t forget to file a feature request. While all the issues Niqui mentions aren’t necessarily the fault of the Flash Player team, if you let them know what’s important to you they can work with the browser manufacturers to sort out any issues.

It’s been more than a while since I posted anything useful on this blog, partly because I’ve been busy with other things and partly because things have been pretty hectic at Yahoo! for the past few months. Now things have calmed down a little, I’m hoping to spend more time coding and writing here, starting with a post tomorrow on how to use the upload functionality of the ActionScript 3.0 Flickr API Library to build a simple Flickr upload tool as an Adobe AIR application.

Update: Okay, so a small post on the upload functionality has turned into a multi-part post on using the AS3 Flickr API Library. Expect the first part around the middle of the week.