TIPS FOR ACCESSIBLE FLASH BANNER
As the popularity of flash banner ads is growing day by day business owners experiment with various types of eye-catching, attractive flash banners on their websites for promoting online markets. But if they want their flash banners accessible to the surfers they have to follow certain important guidelines. Here are some of the top tips for the creation of accessible flash banner ads:
First of all, you have to make a text equivalent for the animation. Flash animations should have a text alternative for the images to make sure that screen readers can read them automatically. There are two options for making the images in the flash banner accessible – the whole animation accessible as one entity or individual graphical elements accessible as separate entities. A single text equivalent, a Name or description, should be given to the flash animation as a whole while each object in the banner should be given separate Name or description if each expresses a different meaning for the banner.
As for text, make the Name or description very short, succinct and to the point. However, for users, Names and descriptions are same as they will read both by default, so better avoid using both together as this will lead to an overload and for the screen readers, a repetition of information.
To choose the Name or description you can follow the same rules applicable to alt text. Since flash banner ads usually link to other pages or sites make sure that the viewer knows where the link will take him to. Don’t use the old link text like “Link to….”, “Image of…”, “Click here….” etc…etc…
It is not necessary that all have flash installed or have a version of access technology that helps read flash. As such, an alternative should be provided for the flash animation, as an image alternative within the object that can be shown in case there is no flash support. Now the image banner ad has to obey the standard rules for images—the alt text provided should be appropriate to the image and for a text image, the text must be replicated. Make a clear link text to the target page of the image. For a long text, a shortened version is preferred instead of replicating it word for word.
Coming to the readability, it is very important that all users must be able to read the colors and text properly and very short sentence is always preferred. Readability can be further enhanced by using contrasting colors, larger font size-18 points acceptable, font style –either Verdana or Arial and bold letters. Avoid information conveyed by colors as a black and white browser will not be able to pick up that message.
For people with low vision or reading problems, animated images will be very distracting and especially when text is also displayed reading will either be difficult or impossible. So flash should provide some mechanism for such users to enable them to make moving, blinking, scrolling or auto-updating information pause a while.
Looping can be controlled by reducing the number of frames in an animation such that animation should not last more than 20 seconds in total and loop only twice if many frames are needed. Also content must not take more than 3 seconds for blinking and it should not include anything that flashes more than 3 times in one second.
These are the main considerations that should be taken into account while generating an accessible Flash Banner Ad.
First of all, you have to make a text equivalent for the animation. Flash animations should have a text alternative for the images to make sure that screen readers can read them automatically. There are two options for making the images in the flash banner accessible – the whole animation accessible as one entity or individual graphical elements accessible as separate entities. A single text equivalent, a Name or description, should be given to the flash animation as a whole while each object in the banner should be given separate Name or description if each expresses a different meaning for the banner.
As for text, make the Name or description very short, succinct and to the point. However, for users, Names and descriptions are same as they will read both by default, so better avoid using both together as this will lead to an overload and for the screen readers, a repetition of information.
To choose the Name or description you can follow the same rules applicable to alt text. Since flash banner ads usually link to other pages or sites make sure that the viewer knows where the link will take him to. Don’t use the old link text like “Link to….”, “Image of…”, “Click here….” etc…etc…
It is not necessary that all have flash installed or have a version of access technology that helps read flash. As such, an alternative should be provided for the flash animation, as an image alternative within the object that can be shown in case there is no flash support. Now the image banner ad has to obey the standard rules for images—the alt text provided should be appropriate to the image and for a text image, the text must be replicated. Make a clear link text to the target page of the image. For a long text, a shortened version is preferred instead of replicating it word for word.
Coming to the readability, it is very important that all users must be able to read the colors and text properly and very short sentence is always preferred. Readability can be further enhanced by using contrasting colors, larger font size-18 points acceptable, font style –either Verdana or Arial and bold letters. Avoid information conveyed by colors as a black and white browser will not be able to pick up that message.
For people with low vision or reading problems, animated images will be very distracting and especially when text is also displayed reading will either be difficult or impossible. So flash should provide some mechanism for such users to enable them to make moving, blinking, scrolling or auto-updating information pause a while.
Looping can be controlled by reducing the number of frames in an animation such that animation should not last more than 20 seconds in total and loop only twice if many frames are needed. Also content must not take more than 3 seconds for blinking and it should not include anything that flashes more than 3 times in one second.
These are the main considerations that should be taken into account while generating an accessible Flash Banner Ad.