Still waiting for Flash [LWN.net]

Still waiting for Flash

Posted Mar 11, 2008 18:01 UTC (Tue) by jengelh (subscriber, #33263)
Parent article: Still waiting for Flash

Flash is anything but barrier-free (“accessibility”), so the sooner you forget about it in
websites that could perfectly do without it, the better for everyone. I agree that some
browser games require it, but many a  webpages just use it in places where it just is not
welcome. Have a wireframe of your new product? Well, that's ok, but that does not mean the
goddamn entire page/domain has to be a multimegabyte flash blob.

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Still waiting for Flash

Posted Mar 11, 2008 18:16 UTC (Tue) by mmarsh (subscriber, #17029) [Link]

I get the impression that many sites use Flash specifically to make it difficult (if not
effectively impossible) to scrape their content.  They can also prevent you from using my
preferred browsing mode: open every interesting link in a new tab, and flip between them as
needed.  This prevents sites from collecting "marketing data" such as how long you viewed a
page before hitting the "back" button, not that that's why I browse that way.

Still waiting for Flash

Posted Mar 12, 2008 7:20 UTC (Wed) by tetromino (subscriber, #33846) [Link]

For what it's worth, Adobe's flash plugin has excellent accessibility support on Windows, and
lets you use screen readers etc. to read flash files. AFAIK the Linux version still doesn't
have any accessibility features, unfortunately; but then again, neither does Gnash.