By Adobe
26 August 2010
Setting the tab order in Adobe Flash Professional is essential when creating accessible SWF content because it affects the logical usage order of the application's controls and also affects the reading order for assistive technologies. To make SWF content accessible for everyone, set the tab order for every element that users will read—unless your application is very simple and has only objects in a single vertical or horizontal group.
To create the tab order with ActionScript, assign the tabIndex property to the following objects:
  • Dynamic text
  • Input text
  • Buttons
  • Movie clips, including compiled movie clips
  • Timeline frames
  • Screens
Provide a complete tab order for all accessible objects. If you create a tab order for a frame but don't specify a tab order for an accessible object in the frame, Adobe Flash Player ignores all the custom tab-order assignments. Additionally, all objects assigned to a tab order, except frames, must have an instance name specified in the Instance Name text field of the Property inspector. Even items that are not tab stops, such as text, must be included in the tab order if you want the item to be read by users in that order.
Tab order
To specify a tab order, assign an order number to the tabIndex property, using the following syntax:
_this.myOption1.btn.tabIndex = 1 _this.myOption2.txt.tabIndex = 2
To learn more about setting the tab order, see the article Making user interfaces more accessibile.

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