User Guide

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CHAPTER 20
Making Director Movies Accessible
As a Macromedia Director MX 2004 author, you might want to provide ways for computer users
with disabilities to experience the movies that you create. Director includes accessibility features
that let you do this. By using these features, you can make existing and new movies accessible to
users who have hearing, visual, or mobility impairment.
With scripts and behaviors, you can add text-to-speech capability to your movies. This lets
visually impaired users hear the text in your movie read aloud by the computer. You can provide
captioning to help users with hearing impairment experience the audio portions of your movies.
Finally, you can enable your movies to be navigated with the keyboard instead of a mouse, which
benefits users with certain kinds of mobility impairment.
If you work on projects sponsored by the U.S. government, you might be required to follow
government guidelines for providing accessibility to disabled users.
You add accessibility to your Director movies by using the included accessibility behaviors or
special script methods. The text-to-speech behaviors and scripting require the Speech Xtra. If you
use text-to-speech in your movie, you must add the Speech Xtra to your movie’s Xtra extensions
list. This is discussed in detail in this chapter.
About government requirements
The U.S. government has stated that multimedia created for the purpose of fulfilling a
government contract must be made accessible to computer users with disabilities. The
government requirements include text-to-speech for the visually impaired, captioning for the
hearing impaired, and keyboard navigation for the mobility impaired.
The full text of the government requirements is available at www.section508.gov/.
Making Director movies accessible
You can make your Director movies accessible by adding behaviors or writing custom scripts.
Director includes several behaviors that let you easily add text-to-speech, captioning, and
keyboard navigation to your movies with simple drag-and-drop procedures. If you want to have
more control over how you implement accessibility in your movies, you can write custom scripts
that use the text-to-speech methods. For more information about text-to-speech script, see
“Accessibility scripting with Lingo or JavaScript syntax” on page 434.