Flex 4 Cookbook

Chapter 24. Internationalization, Accessibility, and Printing

To ensure that your applications are usable by the widest range of users, Flex 4 provides many accessibility, internationalization, and printing options. For example, if your project must comply with accessibility standards, you’ll find screen-reader detection and keyboard tab orders to help visually impaired users, or users for whom the use of a pointing device is difficult or impossible. Flex’s toolset for internationalization and localization was much improved in Version 4. The localization features include a built-in internationalization resource manager, runtime locale determination, runtime locale switching, and resource modules that can be requested at runtime. If your challenge is closer to home—say, if you need printed deliverables—the latest version of Flex has that covered too. Flex 4 enables you to print Flex components and includes a DataGrid component specifically for printing repetitive, multipage output.

This chapter contains recipes that will walk you through formatting many kinds of output for printing, including a solution for formatting collections of components for printing across multiple pages by using PrintDataGrid with a custom item renderer. Recipes for displaying non-Western characters, detecting screen readers, and defining tab orders help make your applications more accessible to visually impaired users. Finally, several techniques for localizing applications are presented.

24.1. Add an International ...