I stand corrected. Lightmaker did a very good job with JK Rowling's site. The deal with the plug-in is it's close-sourced and only available for a small number of platforms. Its use is an accessibility risk in the same fashion as generating content with JavaScript. For Flash as it is with all web technologies, the designer has to have accessibility in mind to design accessibly; it is much easier to design an inaccessible Flash site than it is to design an inaccessible HTML page.
It sounds to me that CSS would solve your problems entirely. If you are using Firefox or Opera, you can supply your own CSS file that forces certain background colors, text colors and font sizes. These settings should override whatever styles the designer put into his or her site. Designers will design however they want, but you ultimately have control over how their sites look to you. Let me know if you are interested in this and I'll whip something up for you.
Nonsense. I've been a web developer for only three years and I've mastered most of the web accessibility issues. My method of learning is the reason for this. I learned to design by the standards, and I learned to build sites that degrade gracefully. The key is education; there are thousands of web designers and developers that never touch the HTML, that start off a page in Design View of whatever tool they use, and they honestly believe that they are advanced web workers. That's how they learned how to do it in school. The state of our web education programs is dreadful world-wide, and something has to be done about that.
Flash is fundamentally inaccessible given that you MUST have the plug-in to get the content. If you have the plug-in, then Flash can be quite accessible. If you don't, then it's absolutely inaccessible. That's why JK Rowling's site has text-only alternatives.
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I stand corrected. Lightmaker did a very good job with JK Rowling's site. The deal with the plug-in is it's close-sourced and only available for a small number of platforms. Its use is an accessibility risk in the same fashion as generating content with JavaScript. For Flash as it is with all web technologies, the designer has to have accessibility in mind to design accessibly; it is much easier to design an inaccessible Flash site than it is to design an inaccessible HTML page.
It sounds to me that CSS would solve your problems entirely. If you are using Firefox or Opera, you can supply your own CSS file that forces certain background colors, text colors and font sizes. These settings should override whatever styles the designer put into his or her site. Designers will design however they want, but you ultimately have control over how their sites look to you. Let me know if you are interested in this and I'll whip something up for you.
Nonsense. I've been a web developer for only three years and I've mastered most of the web accessibility issues. My method of learning is the reason for this. I learned to design by the standards, and I learned to build sites that degrade gracefully. The key is education; there are thousands of web designers and developers that never touch the HTML, that start off a page in Design View of whatever tool they use, and they honestly believe that they are advanced web workers. That's how they learned how to do it in school. The state of our web education programs is dreadful world-wide, and something has to be done about that.
Flash is fundamentally inaccessible given that you MUST have the plug-in to get the content. If you have the plug-in, then Flash can be quite accessible. If you don't, then it's absolutely inaccessible. That's why JK Rowling's site has text-only alternatives.