Rich Media – Multimedia, Flash, Silverlight, Java

Within HTML documents there are additional third-party applications or formats that can provide rich content. The three most popular are

  • Flash
  • Sliverlight
  • Java

Video and audio can be made quite accessible. Usually what is required is you need to provide

  • A synchronized transcript (captions) for video
  • A transcript for audio
  • A media player that people with disabilities can interact with

Flash, Silverlight, and Java can be made accessible, however, it involves a set of techniques that most developers of these technologies don’t know or don’t follow. It will take extra work to make the content accessible. Additionally, Flash and Silverlight will only be accessible to several user groups when they use Internet Explorer. Often these technologies are used to provide cross-platform compatibility. There are several newer techniques with HTML and ARIA that might be able to accomplish the same goal as Flash, Silverlight, and Java.