How to hide a flash movie from screen readers and keyboard users

Adding a Flash movie to your web page may be making the content of that page inaccessible to some visitors. For example, Keyboard users and people using screen reader users are likely to run into the following problems:

• The keyboard cannot be used to 'focus' on the flash movie, i.e. the user can't tab to the movie object and explore the content.
• When navigating the flash movie via the keyboard it is impossible to get back out again - making it impossible to explore the rest of the page.

Here are a couple of tips for getting around the problems:

Make the Flash movie invisible to keyboard users.

If the flash movie does not contain valuable content, i.e., it might just be for decoration - the following technique can be used to make the flash movie invisible to keyboards and screen readers:

Use the wmode option within the embed and the object tag,

<object .....>
<param name="wmode" value="opaque">
<embed wmode="opaque ....>
</embed>
</object>

Rather than embedding the flash movie within the HTML page, create a separate HTML page that contains the movie, and link to it. This allows the user to user the back button on their browser to exit from the movie when they are finished.

Links

I found these tips come on the excellent article about creating accessible flash on the WebAIM website.

Contributed by Jim Byrne
Updated Tuesday 6 Jul 2004

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