Adobe Makes Flash Crawlable

Posted by CmdrTaco on Tuesday July 1, 2008 @12:38AM from the what-about-cut-and-paste dept.

nickull wrote in his journal that "Today Adobe systems made an announcement that it has provided technology and information to Google and Yahoo! to help the two search engine rivals index Shockwave Flash (SWF) file formats. According to the company, this will provide more relevant search rankings of the millions pieces of Flash content. Until now, developers had to implement workarounds for exposing text content used in Flash to search-engine spiders and other bots such as using XHTML data providers. While the Flash content is exposed, it is not yet clear how it will be utilized by the search engines, as they have not revealed their algorithms. The SWF specification is openly published."

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Re:What Adobe should do by Anonymous Coward · 2008-07-01 01:25 · Score: 5, Informative

"Flash for entire websites is horrible and inaccessible."
Not true (anymore). As of Flash 9, Adobe got some good accessibility implemented. You can have full keyboard accessibility within a Flash movie by enabling tabbing and setting tab indexes, as well as Section 508 support for screen readers. This was present in Flash 8 as well, but you had to jump through hoops just to enable it so it would work properly. Any flash files that aren't made accessible is due to programmer negligence and/or laziness. I still agree that web sites should be at most a mixture of Flash and regular HTML, but it's not as bad as you say.