On Thursday, October 8th, 2009 we are proud to host Michelle Bagur, an Accessability and Useability expert from Effective UI.  We will be meeting in Room 161, Communication Arts and Sciences Building on the Campus of MSU.  The meeting will start at 7pm.

Ever been tasked with building an RIA that was accessible? Then you know what Michelle’s talking about. Accessibility and Flex don’t go hand in hand, despite what you might have heard.

Accessibility is getting pretty hot these days, RIAs need be accessible if they’re gonna continue to be viable. Knowing the tricks and gotchas is going to be invaluable for any Flex Developer.

After lingering under the radar for years, accessibility is now becoming a necessary consideration in application and Web site development. Recent events and increased public focus, combined with the maturation of the Flash platform, create an environment that almost demands that accessibility be built into applications. Knowledge of accessibility methodology will soon become vital to every serious Flex developer or designer’s resume.

Despite the important role accessibility plays in applications, it is still difficult to implement well in Flex. In this session, we will examine the ways Flex is and is not useful for creating accessible applications. We will discuss Adobe’s basic accessible components and accessibility methodologies, along with the importance of accessibility considerations in initial design and architecture. We will also discuss the bugs that exist in Flex which preclude accessibility. The session will highlight lessons learned in an attempt to implement accessibility late in the development cycle of an application, and offer experiential advice on how to minimize frustrations of creating accessible applications. Finally, we will look at how the accessibility implementation is slated to change with the release of Flex 4.