Universal Web Accessibility

Multimedia

Videos
Videos on the Web must be captioned. SMC's Alternate Media Specialist can create captions for your Web videos.

Flash
Macromedia's Accessibility and Macromedia Flash MX 2004 page explains the new accessibility features built into Macromedia Flash MX 2004 and Macromedia Flash Player 7.
In order to be accessible the Flash developer must include accessibility/usability features when creating the application, not always a simple thing to do, and the project must be exported in Flash Player 6. Even then there will be some things that will not work or be accessible no matter how hard you try. If so, you may need to ask if the Flash piece is really serving a need and if there is another alternative.
Some things that can be done to a Flash movie to make it more accessible include setting tab index, using dynamic text, allowing keyboard functionality, and providing a context for how the information is presented - e.g., content revealed with mouse-overs.

Other useful resources include:
Sonokids.com - a website that has some sample code that allows you to tab into and out of a Flash movie. They also have some examples of Flash movies usable by individuals with disabilities.
Jakob Nielsen's Flash and Web-Based Applications and Making Flash Usable for Users With Disabilities which contain suggestions from usability experts about how and when to use Flash.

Powerpoint
Some screen readers can read PowerPoint slides on the Web to some degree, but possibly not well enough to be considered truly "accessible." People who use screen readers will most likely need to have the slides in HTML format in order to access them.

The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign has released a PowerPoint Accessibility Wizard for PowerPoint 2000 and XP, which can convert most PowerPoint Presentations to an accessible HTML interface. The user may then select a Text-Only page (which contains all the text content of the slide in addition to alternative-text descriptions of images) or a Graphics page (which contains an image of the actual PowerPoint slide), depending on which works best for them. Hyperlinks and slide navigation commands are created automatically.

The Wizard does not retain animated content or dynamic rich media and only simple data tables can be converted (via prompts to enter the row, column, and cell contents).

More Information on Powerpoint and accessibility see: Webaim's PowerPoint How-to pages.

[This Page still under construction -- More Information to be added soon]