A New Approach for Flash Accessibility

August 23rd, 2008

Author: Michael Krotscheck

Category: Articles, Inspiration

Tags: accessibility, actionscript, firefox, flash, flex, internet explorer, wai-aria, windows

My colleague (aka running buddy, aka friend, aka fashionista) Andrea Hill and I had a pow-wow a few months back in anticipation of her Accessibility presentation at Spring </br> . Personally, I thought the conversation was a perfect example of how genius occurs at the intersections of knowledge domains, as we were able to take her expertise on Accessibility standards and my expertise in Flash and Actionscript and come up a back-of-the-napkin approach to Flash Accessibility that might just fix all the headaches caused by interfacing with Assistive Technology. Note that this solution does NOT absolve you from designing for visual impairments, hearing deficiencies and so forth- this is a way of interfacing with screen readers.

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Serializing and Deserializing ValueObjects in Flex and AIR

August 15th, 2008

Author: Michael Krotscheck

Category: Tutorials

Tags: actionscript, air, ByteArray, File, flex

One of the holy grails of the "Build Once, Deploy Anywhere" promise of the Adobe AIR isn’t simply that your application will cross all major operating systems, but also that the same codebase can be deployed via the web as an RIA. Admittedly, there remain some differences in functionality; For instance, a desktop application has to worry about windows or contextual menus. Another challenge altogether is transferring data between a desktop and a web application, which can be a daunting task if you’re trying to share multiple files, yet is perhaps not as difficult as you might think.

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