Did you install flash? Most likely it was preinstalled on your computer by the OS or browser (depending on your browser choice). It is exactly the same with screenreader user.

I saw Bob Regan (Macromedia now Adobe) accessibility evanglist give a demo on Flash accessibility a few years ago, and even then it was doing things I could not manage with HTML. The bad news at the time was you needed the lastest version of Flash and the lastest versions of the top flight screenreaders. A few years on, those products are now mainstream.

Aral - I’m curious - what exactly are you checking for in the swf?

http://osflash.org/flashaid

One of the main reasons I used a callback function is because of the asynchronous nature of the communication between the SWF and the page. Having a callback saves you from having to write code yourself to see if and when a global variable has come into existence. And, it’s very easy to set a global variable from the callback function if this is how you’d rather work. I guess we could add a second way of calling it whereby if you do not include the callback handlers, it does set a global variable for you if you feel this is going to be an important use case.

Also, the current version only tells you whether accesibility features are installed, not whether they are currently active. I’m going to improve it when I get a moment to add this feature too (I was going to but I read of some issues with this and I didn’t have enough time to test it so I left it out of the first release.)

Regarding writing the DIV by JavaScript: You can definitely do this but you’d lose the benefit of the current method which allows you to place alternative content in the DIV that displays by default. (This is all handled by the SWFObject script that embeds the Flash movie.) In other words, this is a feature not a bug :)

Looking forward to hearing your (and others’) feedback on this.

I think mild namespace polution is a small price to pay for this. It’s also simple enough, that I’m left pondering what downsides I must be missing, since this doesn’t exist yet.