I think some of the problems with the accessibility of Flash are due in part to assistive technology vendors. When Macromedia did their accessibility work on Flash a few years ago the assistive technology vendors were all too keen to jump on the Flash band wagon; however, since then they seem not to have paid a great deal of attention to Flash. This has left assistive technologies with pretty minimal support for Flash and Flash with pretty minimal accessibility. As we found with Whidbey, you can put the accessibility work into an application or technology but it’s really up to the assistive technology vendors whether they use it or not, which is something of an unfair situation as it can lead to products and companies being unfairly labelled as inaccessible due to no fault of their own.

One piece of advice that I’m starting to offer is that if you don’t want to play the app compat game with assistive technologies then you can still make your software accessible. At its core accessibility is about communication, and certainly not about app compat with assistive technologies. When people interact with a computer they are really just communicating their intentions and desires. This communication is also found in software with software just communicating the actions that a user can perform and the results of actions. Typically, a user communicates with a computer by encoding their intentions into physical movements and spatial relationships, the latter applying to pointing devices, whilst a computer typically encodes the information it has to communicate in a visual form. If a user is incapable of making the physical movements necessary to encode the information they wish to communicate to a computer or is incapable of assessing spatial relationships if the use of a pointing device is required then the input communication channel between user and computer is broken and the two cannot communicate; likewise, if the user is unable to receive visual stimuli, or another type of sensory stimuli if the communication is non-visual, then the output channel for communication between computer and user is broken. When one or both of the communication channels are broken then you get problems with accessibility. Therefore, accessibility is about communicating through channels that both the computer and user can use. This means that provided a piece of software has the capability of communicating through alternate communication channels it will be accessible regardless of whether it has app compat with assistive technologies.