One of the unfortunate evolutions of the web in recent years has been an increasing moving away from text. It’s no longer enough to have text on your page — even basic information pages — or to use basic HTML links between pages, or anything like that. No, today the big thing is to program sites entire in Flash.
Flash is fun. Flash is neat. Flash is, well, flashy.
Flash is also a graphical black box. The eyes of the viewer can read it. But that’s all.
Blind people can’t, nor can their audio software.
But, more importantly, neither can Google. And that’s why it’s a technological dead end.
Google is, for all intents, a blind user. A billionaire blind user with tens of millions of friends, all of whom hang on his every word. I suspect Google will have a stronger impact than the ADA in building accessible websites.
In a world where Google likely has a valuation several orders of magnitude higher than any chrome such as flash, graphics, audio, interactivity, or “personalization”, I see a heady revision.
(ultimately via BoingBoing)