Together Apple and Adobe reinvented publishing in the 80s. They’ve been sparring ever since. Recently the heat turned up with the release of the non-Flash compatible iPad and Steve Job’s public push for HTML5 (see this site) as the development standard of the future.
I for one thinks it’s going to be a while for Flash to be replaced by HTML5. Flash is a very powerful tool. I also have the feeling that by the time the change actually comes Adobe will be making an excellent tool for creating rich HTML5 content.
In the meantime, Flash designers and developers simply have to do better with what they have. The days of horribly unusable flash sites are not behind us and it just doesn’t have to be this way. Usable and accessible websites and applications can be built in Flash, if you take the time to know how.
On the usability side the big problems users complain about with Flash sites are well documented. Here’s Don Norman’s list from Flash: 99% Bad:
“In the future, multimedia features may well be better integrated with browsers and thus these problems will be solved. For now, though, the fact that Flash is not standard HTML creates a host of nasty usability issues:
- The “Back” button does not work. If you navigate within a Flash object, the standard backtracking method takes you out of the multimedia object and not, as expected, to the previous state.
- Link colors don’t work. Given this, you cannot easily see where you’ve been and which links you’ve yet to visit. This lack of orientation creates navigational confusion.
- The “Make text bigger/smaller” button does not work. Users are thus forced to read text in the designer-specified font size, which is almost always too small since designers tend to have excellent vision.
- Flash reduces accessibility for users with disabilities.
- The “Find in page” feature does not work. In general, Flash integrates poorly with search.
- Internationalization and localization is complicated. Local websites must enlist a Flash professional to translate content. Also, text that moves is harder to read for users who lack fluency in the language.”
Since this article was written in 2000 all of these issues, and many more, have been addressed in Flash via things like SWF address, dynamic text, advanced Actionscript and XML integration. What hasn’t changed is people’s tendency to abuse the tool. Norman states the issue succinctly:
“None of these usability problems are inherent in Flash. You can design usable multimedia objects that comply with the guidelines and are easy to use. The problem is simply that current Flash design tends to encourage abuse.”
It encourages abuse? So what? Let people try stuff out. I for one like a little experimentation (why shouldn’t we make the scroll bar daily?). Maybe that’s why I’ve always appreciated Flash and much of the work produced with it. It’s full of possibility. And rest assured, I’ve seen bad designers make a mess in HTML too.
But that’s not even what’s important here. It’s that functional, usable, and accessible products can’t be developed in Flash.
If you want to know more here are some resources that can help
Creating Accessible Sites in Flash
http://www.adobesystems.ca/accessibility/products/flash/tutorial/
Make Flash Sites Searchable
http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flash/articles/flash_searchability.html
Optimizing Flash Web Sites for Search Engines
http://www.actionscript.org/forums/showthread.php3?t=102187
Deep Linking in Flash
http://www.asual.com/swfaddress/
Deep Linking in Flash Websites
http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flash/articles/deep_linking.html
Creating Drupal Site with Flash or Flex
http://www.adobe.ca/devnet/flash/articles/drupal_flash.html
XML and Flash from Start to Finish
http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flash/articles/learning_xml.html
Flash developers better get on it, because even as Apple pushes for the open standard of HTML5, they offer us one of the most proprietary, walled-off, and well-designed product suites in the world. And right now people can’t seem to get enough of them.