Clunky and badly designed animation has flooded the web for as long as I can remember. In the early days this phenomenon belonged to the animated gif files blinking furiously at you in an erratic attempt to attract your attention, while in comparison today’s web is littered with a mixture of gif, javascript and now flash animation. So this has made me wonder, is this animation simply a crude distraction that is degrading our web experience and masking the quality beneath, or is this what our aspiration for the web should be?
I am going to try as hard as I can to not be biased here but I have some pretty major issues with Flash! Firstly it is not truly accessable to users, for those who have problems with their sight Flash offers a poor experience giving screen readers no chance to express the content whether it be pictures or text. Secondly, Google have made steps forward with the indexing of Flash content, but no matter how well Google can manage this the content will always be sub-standard compared to well written HTML, and this only means that Google can index Flash other search engines have not made these advances, so Flash immediately is at a disadvantage as a web tool.
‘So Flash can’t be indexed big deal, it brings a more complete experience’ – This is the kind of response I hear when a flash developer defends their favourite tool. Well, it’s not as simple as that, just because things can animate doesn’t mean that they should, when I visit a web site I want the easy to find content that I came for not a series of unnecessary animations flicking from picture to picture with pointless un-indexable messages in between! Nor do I want the pages or content to be randomly redrawn or to be erratically presented, just give me what I wanted that is why I am here, and why I have given your site a chance! This is where I feel Flash has moved away from the accessible web of now and the future, the web is where we can express, entertain, share and learn, putting blocks in-front of this creates a lesser experience not a better one. Maybe Flash should stay in its newly discovered home of television where more and more animators are using Flash to create amazing cartoons and animations for the visual world and to be honest it feels more accurately placed there.
See why I was worried about being biased! – So I will try and redress the balance – Flash is an amazing piece of animation software, in my time I have seen some amazingly executed Flash websites and rich application, these helped make the web a more visual experience during the time before quality design started to take hold. The sad thing is that I believe Flash is being left behind as the drive to be at the top of a Google search takes hold; Flash cannot be indexed in this same way and the industry doesn’t seem in-a-rush to change that. As Flash becomes an integral part of the visual media market maybe it will find its true place in the future of TV interactivity?
Overall, the lack of accessibility has always been an issue for me. Not only has the web accepted flash for the building of websites but a large number of sites have adopted flash banner advertising as a way to generate cash, this is not only annoying but demonstrates a complete lack of understanding for how the web should be.
In an ideal world we should strive for well designed, accessible websites which contain advertising that complements the web product cleanly and professionally instead of being a distracting add-on. I hope the industry can move in the right direction, however Flash may simply be too popular!