Are Flash blogs the future?
March 20, 2007 – 2:20 pm | by Miriam SchwabLutinCapuche Blog has developed a plugin called FlogMaker that changes your blog to a Flash-based blog. You can see a demo of a Flash blog on the site, and manipulate the background, colors, and more and see the results. It works like any other plugin, where you just upload and activate.
It’s an interesting concept. It’s hard to tell whether it is user-friendly or not because the demo is in French, so I found myself struggling to figure out what was what because of the language barrier. I am not sure this will catch on, though, since Flash sites are perceived to be non-accessible, and I’m not sure if this type of site is more accessible than any other Flash site.
2 Responses to “Are Flash blogs the future?”
By Eliyahu Skoczylas on Mar 26, 2007 | Reply
Flash is not just “perceived” as non-accessible, they really are:
1) The text cannot be “read” by text-to-speech readers or Braille displays, nor may the colors be adjusted for color-handicapped viewers, rendering the sites literally inaccessible to visually challenged viewers;
2) The text content is not searchable, so they can’t be indexed by search engines and are not accessible through sites like Google;
3) As you noted with the French example, Flash text cannot be processed by automatic language translation tools like BabbleFish, WorldLingo, et al, rendering them inaccessible to non-speakers of the language in which they were written.
In short, Flash is a very access restricting method of putting information on a web site.
By Miriam on Mar 26, 2007 | Reply
Hi Eliyahu - nice to see you here!
Thanks for confirming what I thought. While a Flash blog is cool and is an interesting variation on the typical blog structure, if it is not search engine friendly or accessible, it simply can’t succeed. I do understand that efforts are being made to make Flash more accessible, and if that does happen, there may be a place for it. In that case, this Flog is simply a vision before its time.