Flex Accessibility full keyboard support and expansion

Flex is a technology product developed by Adobe to support the development and deployment of RIA (Rich Internet applications), primarily for enterprise-class applications. Good accessibility support especially full keyboard support is an excellent flex product prerequisite, Flex itself provides some basic accessibility keyboard support such as TAB switch control, space key selection, etc., this tutorial mainly introduces Flex to Ac Cessibility full keyboard support and how to use the existing APIs to expand to better achieve product-level accessibility full keyboard support. To learn this tutorial, you need some Flex programming experience to understand the basic concepts of accessibility.

Introduction to Flex and accessibility

Flex is a server component of an Internet application that is used to create rich information. Flex's built-in interface can be displayed on the client system by the Macromedia Flash player, which is essentially an XML language that describes the application interface (MXML) and a ECMA Specification scripting language (ActionScript) that handles users and systems Event and build a complex data model. As an important language for RIA application, Flex is widely used for its rich user interface experience and simple development mode.

accessibility, referred to as a11y, refers to the accessibility of software products, ease of use. The purpose of accessibility is to make products not only available to ordinary users, but also to meet the needs of users with special customer groups such as vision, hearing, muscle movement (Unable to use mouse). This requires that the SOFTWARE product must meet the following aspects as far as possible:

Display user interface to meet visually impaired users in special style such as white background black or black background

All user interface text, input boxes, etc. can be displayed in voice form by some tool (screen Reader) for the convenience of visually impaired users

Each control in the user interface, such as pictures, text, buttons, and so on, can be operated by keyboard (full keyboard support), such as using the Tab key to toggle between controls.

Many user interface development languages provide support for accessibility, and Flex also provides support for accessibility, and by using different motifs and themes, flex applications can simply implement the first of these requirements by setting the Label for each control or ToolTip can also simply meet the second requirement, Flex support for the full keyboard is more complex. This article mainly introduces Flex's full keyboard support and how to use existing support to extend to achieve better full keyboard support at the product level.

Flex Accessibility full keyboard support

The official Flex development documentation provided by Adobe is a simple introduction to the Accessibility section, and this section focuses on the interfaces, classes, methods, and variables associated with the accessibility keyboard in Flex, and how to use them through examples.

Configure the compiled properties of Flex applications to support accessibility

Flex provides a "accessible" parameter to configure whether the application supports accessibility. In Flex Builder, the user can accessible the SWF file configuration through the Project Properties Flex Compiler Generate, as shown in Figure 1:

Figure 1.Flex Builder Configuration