RantWoman admits it: her blog contains an inaccessible widget. On the main page, below the heading NeoEarth, the widget makes a really cool graphic that shows a map of the world with dots representing all the places from which people, or at least proxy handles, have visited RantWoman's blog.
RantWoman admits the map is one of those globe projections that makes the northern hemisphere landmasses look huge compared to the landmasses in the southern hemisphere. RantWoman admits that much as she might enjoy more hits from Barnaul or Capetown or Buenas Aires, she can cope with the visual reminder that her blog does not necessarily offer readers from those or scores of other locations much to justify the click.
The tougher problem: RantWoman did some poking around with her screen reader and RantWoman has not figured out a way to launch the NeoEarth Flash Movie except by double-clicking on the map with her rodent. RantWoman's arrow down from the heading test resulted in a window opening with the opportunity to edit some JavaScript, an opportunity RantWoman strangely just let pass by quickly closing the window before she screwed something up. RantWoman remembers visitng this window when she put the widget on her blog; she does not presently feel that better acquaintance is needed.
When RantWoman does click on the map, a new window opens with a larger sized version of the map and dots of varying sizes representing the relative number of hits from the cities represented by the dots. RantWoman knows the dots represent cities because with the screen enlarger she can drag the mouse over the dots and a text name usually appears. Well, there is one that just says Australia and another that just says Germany and a couple others like that.
If RantWoman makes the screen reader read form fields, most of the time the fields are numbered or unlabelled but sometimes if RantWoman has just been dragging over a dot, the city name associated with the dot will also get read. There is another level of zoom and also unlabelled buttons that show a table of city names and hit counts and a couple other buttons that sometimes have content the screen reader will detect.
After describing all these symptoms, RantWoman further acknowledges that she could check out a couple points in her screen reader documentation and maybe some other points about Flash. Alas, the life of the self-employed is so rich with opportunities for such do-it-yourself tech support that for now RantWoman will simply document the problem, put some more reading of help files on her to-do list and include the link below about how to make Flash applications more accessible. Hint: think about accessibility from the ground up.
http://www.webaim.org/techniques/flash/RantWoman also notes that System Access reportedly handles Flash content better than JAWS. Sigh. Add home compatibility testing to the work profile....
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