RNIB provide advice on making Flash banners accessible
January 28 2009
by Jake Liddell
The advice can be found here: http://www.rnib.org.uk/wacblog/flash/accessible-flash-banner-ad-guidelines/.
The advice can equally apply to the kind of animated fade-in, fade-out of text and images that is often seen on homepages.
However, we should still be mindful that there are many other reasons why a Flash-based banner might still be inaccessible. Guideline 7.3 of the WCAG 1.0 accessibility guidelines states"Movement: Until user agents allow users to freeze moving content, avoid movement in pages. Priority 2.”. To meet the guideline, you need to provide a way to stop your flash animation.
If this would be aesthetically compromising, you need to consider meeting Guideline 11.4 - “If, after best efforts, you cannot create an accessible page, provide a link to an alternative page that uses W3C technologies, is accessible, has equivalent information (or functionality), and is updated as often as the inaccessible (original) page. Priority 1” - and producing a non-flash equivalent.