Accessibility and Flash

[Drewsky]

What percentage of average web-surfers can access Flash websites? Are there statistics on this somewhere?

[raviganesh91221]

almost all i think. but not sure

[JPnyc]

Flash is not all that universally accessible. For one thing, as far as I know you can't change font display size in flash. Users with poor eyesight are outta luck. Some users surf using IE or shell browser, and have activeX disabled for safety. IE cannot load Flash without activeX.

[toicontien]

That's not entirely true: http://alistapart.com/articles/flashsatay/

[Stephen Philbin]

I have flash installed on one of my browsers, but that's not to say it actually displays. Most pages using flash seem to be build by people that seem to think Javascript is required to put a flash object on a page. I have a Javascript whitelist of sites that are allowed to use Javascript and the rest are disallowed automatically. Naturally almost every site on the net is not on the list and so any flash object put in place using Javascript will not display on screen.

Works out pretty well that way though. I find pretty much every flash object (or in the worst case flash site) tends to be pointless crap I don't wanna see anyway.

Regardless of whether a user has Flash installed or not though, the information (assuming there is any) is never readily accessible.

[NogDog]

I've not installed Flash in Firefox, which is my default browser. If I want to actually see the Flash stuff on some site that I browse, then I open it up in IE6. This saves me a lot of time in the long run, not having to wait for Flash objects to download, hitting the back-button and trying the next Google search result when I hit an all-Flash site, etc. :)

I'm often annoyed by the Flash sites I do visit where the design was obviously done by someone with 20/20 vision on a large monitor, and it cannot be resized for users like me with poor eyesite and viewing on a fairly small notebook screen. :( (Glasses for nearsighted people actually make things look a bit smaller while bringing them into better focus.)

[invertedpanda]

As well, you have to consider that it is another software layer that the user has to deal with, which means that you have another point-of-failure. Not only do you have to worry about the browser crashing due to the odd bug or two, but you also have to worry about flash crashing.

My suggestion? If you are going to use flash, make 100% sure you have an HTML equiv.