Accessible flash.

Flash has had a bad press when it comes to accessibility and there are also issues with the indexing of flash based content by search engines. Not least of which is that when an entire site is created in Flash there is only one entrance page to the content, which dramatically restricts the breadth of indexable information.

But then on the other hand, from a design perspective some sites need the slick animation and interactivity that Flash offers. So how do you get the best of both worlds? The polished presentation of Flash and the accessibility and search engine friendliness of xhtml.

What we will do is to utilise both a Flash and an xhtml interface, the flash site will provide the main visual interface and the xhtml version will be primarily for screen readers and search engines providing a keyword and link rich pure content layer.

So here's how it's done.

1. Database your content. After all we will be separating our content from presentation.
2. Flash Satay. We'll be using the Flash Satay method of integrating flash into our pages to ensure standards compliant flash pages.
3. Page side we will create a basic xhtml page that writes our data based content into the no-flash portion of the object tag.
4. Flash side the same data based information will be used to create our dynamic flash movie.
5. Where am I? Now we use our favourite server side script to tell Flash the section and page identity as it loads.

There we have it, a database driven, accessible, search engine friendly Flash site.

If you would like to see a tutorial for this, just let me know.

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