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Flash

Yet again, the level of accessibility depends upon your use of the tool, not upon the tool itself. Some Flash can be made accessible, some Flash cannot. Flash that is merely animation can be made accessible by the addition of a captioning track for deaf users and an audio descriptor track for blind users in addition to the main content tracks. By creating all these at once, the designer now has the opportunity to package it for a variety of disabilities and audiences with only a small degradation of content value.

Notice, though, that once you add any controls to this movie, such as start and stop buttons, the movie becomes inaccessible. Thus, when it's acceptable for a Flash movie to start running without user prompting, and the movie is basic animation, Flash is fine for all users. Used otherwise, it's completely inaccessible.

Macromedia is in the process of making the text portions of Flash available to screen reader programs. However, that still leaves the graphical and interactive components with no ready translation. At this time any Flash movie that requires the user to act upon the movie by using the mouse (drag and drop, menus, control buttons, etc.) is completely inaccessible to blind users. It is possible to program key stroke commands in Flash, but two problems still exist: First, you would have to teach every visitor to your site your unique set of key strokes, which is a tedious task for the user. Second, even if a blind person could use key commands to move elements around or to make a selection, they have no form of feedback telling them where something has moved to or what it is that they're selecting.