BTW, those bells and whistles I mentioned. Many people do want them. To demonstrate what I mean, check out the demos of the Media Player activity module I've been developing: http://matbury.com/moodle/course/view.php?id=9#section-9
This and its predecessor, the FLV Player, have been very popular. I've done searches on Google for the module help pages and they're installed on a wide range of university, college, school and business Moodle sites. It's a one-stop solution for the majority of course content developers' needs for using multimedia as a learning resource and it's relatively easy for non-technical staff to deploy some very complex features.
If IE, Safari, FF, et al agreed on a web standard, and we assume that content developers had no problem transcoding video files into the proscribed CODEC and container without serious file degradation and leaving "artefacts" in the streams, how easy do you think it would be to implement similar features as this (see the demos) in HTML5?
Here's some more on accessibility in Flash from none other than Web AIM. The author claims that in many ways, Flash content can be made more accessible than HTML: http://www.webaim.org/techniques/flash/
Flash also supports multi-touch so it doesn't take a great leap of the imagination to see how this can help with accessibility, e.g. scalable graphics for menu buttons for the visually impaired, touch for assistance, less of a reliance on tabbing, etc. : http://theflashblog.com/?p=1975
Flash also supports multi-touch so it doesn't take a great leap of the imagination to see how this can help with accessibility, e.g. scalable graphics for menu buttons for the visually impaired, touch for assistance, less of a reliance on tabbing, etc. : http://theflashblog.com/?p=1975
In reply to Matt Bury
Re: Developer announcement: Flash vs. HTML5 - Please read this
by Penny Leach -
Just for interest (I am dreadfully behind on reading Moodle forum emails, woe), one of our guys here at Liip recently did some **really amazing** work on making a complicated Flash game completely accessible and achieved the highest rating possible (AA+) from the Swiss company "Access 4 All" who audit sites for accessibility (http://access4all.ch/blog/?p=1333 (German))
You can read more about what he did on our blog here:
http://blog.liip.ch/archive/2010/06/21/the-quest-for-accessible-flash-part1.html
and here:
http://blog.liip.ch/archive/2010/06/21/the-quest-for-accessible-flash-part2.html
I know this is a gratuitous plug, but I was totally impressed with it, and it definitely proves that Flash *can* be accessible.
You can read more about what he did on our blog here:
http://blog.liip.ch/archive/2010/06/21/the-quest-for-accessible-flash-part1.html
and here:
http://blog.liip.ch/archive/2010/06/21/the-quest-for-accessible-flash-part2.html
I know this is a gratuitous plug, but I was totally impressed with it, and it definitely proves that Flash *can* be accessible.