I come to bury Flash, not to praise it,
writes Matt May in this excellent thread about the end of Adobe Flash. Not so long ago, web designers used Flash to create striking visuals and animations and games. But shortly after that, it began to replace HTML and CSS which caused a ton of accessibility problems. Most Flash websites weren’t navigable by keyboard and screen readers couldn’t parse them at all.
Matt describes this core problem at the very heart of Flash: the fact that it excluded so many people from the web back then.
“A picture of an interface” is a good way to think about it. But, overall, I reckon this thread is important because it reinforces the idea that we ought to think about accessibility every single day, regardless of whether we’re working on a large web app, a tiny marketing website, or contributing to an enormous JavaScript framework:
Every day we write code, we’re deciding who is welcome and who is not.
