Accessibility & Usability?

What is the difference between accessibility and usability? These two notions seem to have nothing in common, however, everyone seems to mix them.

• Wikipedia: Accessibility
• Wikipedia: Usability

I’m thinking more and more of having one part of my work centered on accessibility issues for Flash, and another one on usability issues. Accessibility issues seem obvious for Flash (because the data is compiled, you can’t access it through usual screen readers, etc.) but usability issues exist as well and can be categorized in a different category. Loading animations are an example of a usability subject, it has nothing to do with accessibility.

I’ve just bought a book about Flash usability problems and solutions. We’ll see what they say!

Interoperability issues: Deeplinking 3!!!

I know, after two articles about deeplinking, you were not expecting a third one. Well, me neither!

Thanks to the wonderful effects of research, I happened to find an article of the Blitz Agency Labs website, talking about the “ultimate” deeplinking functionality for Flash: a JavaScript enabling deeplinking, bookmarking AND the use of the ‘back’ button in your browser!

Asual Interactive Solutions, a small Bulgarian agency, provides the script on their website. Blitz used it for the GE Imagination Theater website and the result is just amazing! I noticed it’s not very smooth but I think it’s mainly because some animations between two pages are pretty long.

Now the question is, what about people who don’t have JavaScript enabled? I’m thinking of creating some kind of “alternative browser toolbar” that would reproduce the address bar, the back & forward buttons and that would appear only when you have disabled JavaScript. Or it could be only a couple of buttons that would be called “back”, “forward” and “permalink”. I need to work it out.

Interoperability issues: Deeplinking 2!

In my latest post, I talked about the deeplinking functionality and how to implement it. Basically, you just have to add a query variable at the end of the URL. Now the thing is, how can your users add a page to their bookmarks or just copy and paste the URL of the page without clicking the “send to a friend” button?

Well, there is a way. The idea is still the same: change the URL. But this time, don’t use query variables, use named anchors. The idea is that you want the address bar of your browser to display a URL going to the very page you’re viewing now. It is possible to modify a URL thanks to JavaScript (window.location.href = ‘http://www.jujupiter.com/index.php?page=home’;) but if you modify your URL by adding query variables, the browser will reload the page, and thus, reload your Flash animation and interrupt animations, which is the last thing that you want.

You have another way of modifying a URL, thanks to named anchors (http://www.jujupiter.com/index.php#page=home). The advantage with them is that they don’t reload the page when you add them through JavaScript. Now the only thing you have to do when you load a page with this URL, is to analyse the URL, see if there is a ‘#’ symbol, and add everything that is behind it at the end of the URL of your Flash movie when you call it in your HTML code:
<param name=movie value="flash_website.swf?page=home" />

And now your user can bookmark every page of your website, or copy and paste them to a friend, add it to a del.icio.us feed…

Here is an article with beautiful examples:

Deep/Stateful Linking in Flash MX 2004 Applications

Interoperability issues: Deeplinking

Another issue of Flash is that you can’t access directly one page of the website through a link. For example, if you may want to show something to some of your friends, you send them the link to the website and you have to tell them to click here and here and here. If I am your friend, I won’t even click on the first link, because I will think “too complicated, don’t have time for that”. But let’s stay I click. I go to the Flash website, I have to wait for it to load and now there is an intro animation and now I have to find the link, the second link, etc. This is very annoying. But there is a way to fix that, that is called “deeplinking”.

Flash accept parameters. When you define it in a tag in your HTML page, you can pass it a few parameters. Thus, you can pass a variable that would indicate the page to display. Usually, the code is:
<param name=movie value=”flash_website.swf”>

If you pass it a few parameters, you have:
<param name=movie value=”flash_website.swf?page=contact”>

In the example above, you’re defining a variable called “page” and assign it the value “contact”. In your Flash movie, you’ll have a piece of code testing the value of “page” and that will go directly to the section indicated by the value of this variable.

Now, you have to define it in your URL: just add the page parameter to the end of your URL, just like for your Flash movie., and you’ll get: http://www.test.com/index.php?page=contact. The “index.php” will, thanks to PHP, pass this parameter to the Flash file and that’s it!

You can now have a feature on the website saying “send to a friend” and giving this url to send to your friend. And now, I’m willing to click on it!

More about deeplinking:

• Deeplinking in Flash applications
• Deep Linking in Flash and AJAX Applications

The next post will be about a more enhanced form of deeplinking.

“Flash sucks”

Jakob Nielsen’s article may be 7 years old, and Flash may have done tremendous improvements, the issue is always resurfacing:

Flash sucks by I’m Mike.

However, the article approaches something that couldn’t be notified 7 years before: the closed specification.

Flash: 99% good?

I found on the Adobe website, a book called “Flash 99% good“, an answer to Jakob Nielsen’s article. There even is a website about the book, but the book is so old (2002) that the website is not about it anymore and it’s probably not up-to-date. However, it would have been interesting to see what information and advice the book was providing, but the customer reviews on Amazon about the book are VERY bad.

That’s Cake on Cake!

A couple of months ago, I heard about frameworks for PHP. I was like “What is it for?” and “Whatever” and also “I don’t have time for new developer gadgets”.

And then, Pascal, a freelance web developer, spent a couple of weeks working on a project at my agency, and he used CakePHP. He had never used it before but he could master it in one day! He showed me a bit how it worked and I was very happy to know about it because, actually, I thought about developing something like that, I wanted it to be my project for uni. Thank God I didn’t do it because it would have been a waste of time, since it already exists! And it is better than what I would have done.

With CakePHP, you design a database, call the “bake.php” script and it writes your entire application! Forms to add, edit, list or delete your items are all done! And you can customize them quite easily. Also, the server rewrites URLs to make them safer, more search-engine friendly and more elegant.

So, I started testing it with a simple application to make articles with images and, er… it took me a bit more than one day to understand how it works but I got it now (even if I still have a couple of weird messages when I edit an article but at least, it doesn’t crash!).

I’m definitely going to use it for jujupiter.com. And this URL thing can work with Flash, thus, my application will be more accessible!

To meditate

• About accessibility
  • Accessibility
• About Web accessibility
  • Web accessibility
  • Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI)
  • Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0
  • Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0 (Working Draft)
• About Flash accessibility
  • Adobe Flash CS3 accessibility
  • Best Practices for Accessible Flash Design
  • Adobe Flash Accessibility web page
• Accessibility tools
  • Functional Accessibility Evaluator
  • WAVE 3.0 Accessibility Tool
  • WebAIM Simulations
  • Fangs – the screen reader emulator

It starts here…

Flash: 99% Bad by Jakob Nielsen