Rob Rusher

First, yes, screen readers can read Flex applications. And yes, its fairly easy. But, I’ll discuss how in a future post. But, if you’d rather send people to your old HTML version of your site when using a read, there is good news. Flash Player has the ability to detect if a screen reader is running on the client machine, even if JavaScript is disabled and/or the Flex application is not compiled as an “accessible swf”. This is possible with the Accessibility class. It is important to note that if the Flex application is compiled as an “accessible swf”, the screen reader will also be able to read content in the swf. If not, the screen reader only reads the words “flash movie start” whenever you interact with it. Talk about a usability buzz kill. So, here is the code to see if a screen reader is currently running (not just installed) and then adds a LinkButton that call... (more)

Flash Player Is Not Open = Big Fat Lie; HTML5 Is the Savior

Flash Player is open and SWF is documented The core of Flash Player is the Tamarin Virtual Machine, which is an open source project under Mozilla. While the SWF file format is not fully open, it is documented by the community on osflash.org. Additionally, there are numerous open source products that read and write SWF files. The Flash Player’s product direction has traditionally been heavily influenced by the community and their needs. The core language for Flash Player is an implementation of ECMAScript 262, which is the same specification for JavaScript. Flex also uses CSS for s... (more)

Back and Forth

For over a decade now, we have been trained to use the "back" and "forward" buttons in our Web browser to review or backtrack previously viewed content. We are trained to the point that there are even keyboard shortcuts. Unfortunately, this can be a problem when browsing Flex applications. Being the well-trained users that we are, we often forget that we could cause the Flex application to reload unwittingly. Fortunately, there is a solution that is built into the Flex SDK and HTML templates that are generated in a Flex Builder project. By default, Flex enables history managemen... (more)

Flex 3 AdvancedDataGrid Summary Divider

The AdvancedDataGrid (ADG) control in Adobe Flex 3 extends the capabilities of the standard DataGrid control to improve data visualization. You can: Sort by multiple columns when you click in the column header Use the styleFunction property to specify a function to apply styles to rows and columns of the control Use an expandable navigation tree in a column to control the visible rows of the control Collect multiple columns under a single column heading Span multiple columns with an item renderer and use multiple item renderers in the same column Working in a combination of these ... (more)

Swiz API reference documentation

Swiz is a framework for Adobe Flex that aims to bring complete simplicity to RIA development. But, until recently, the documentation was limited. But now… Swiz 0.6.2 Actionscript API Reference: http://swizframework.org/ Swiz Framework Site: http://on3solutions.com/swiz062/ Swiz Framework Source: http://code.google.com/p/swizframework/ Enjoy guys. Now start coding! ... (more)