Accessible Adobe Flash Websites

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Making Flash Websites Section 508 & SEO Friendly

The best process to insuring that a Adobe Flash website is Section 508 accessible, is to offer a landing page that has two links. One link will point to a html-text based site, and the other link will point to a .swf site, with the html-text link being defined as Section 508 Accessible. Adobe Flash is not Section 508 compatible and a completely .swf based website should not even be considered when offering section 508 accessibility. Simply defined, Adobe Flash is not Section 508 accessible, and an alternative to a flash object MUST be provided.

In regards to Adobe Flash being SEO friendly, Google and Adobe have introduced a new algorithym that will insure that completed .swf based web pages can now be indexed by search engines: Goolgle Learns to Crawl Flash.

Does this mean that Adobe Flash is now completely Search Engine Friendly? Not exactly. The biggest difficulty with this issue is that a website that is completely Search Engine Friendly will use h1, h2, p type html text tags to define text. The Google algorithym created to search for text in .swf files does not search for anything other then text. A site that is flashed based that sales "Big Purple Shoes For Single Men" will most certainly not compare to a website that is correctly optimized for search engines with the keyword phrase "Big Purple Shoes for Single Men". The algorithym will look at all the tags defined in the html text based site and give presedence over a website that has simply embedded the same keyword phrase within the .swf file.

For more information on some great tests proving that the google .swf algorithym is working as it should go here: Flash & SEO Indexing

You must take into consideration that Google is simply indexing content, where previously the Google algorithym was not able to index .swf files. To compare a .swf based indexed website to an html-text based indexed website is like comparing apples to oranges, with HTML-text still having priority. Although changes in some search engine algorithyms are enable .swf files to be indexed if properly developed, Adobe Flash websites are still much prettier to the eyes then they are to the binary algorithyms as defined by search engine bots.