One of the biggest challenges we’re going to have is making sure Rich Internet Applications have the same level of accessibility as any other web application. Andrea Hill focuses on accessibility and she has been diving into RIAs lately. She’s taken note of the two things that RIAs aren’t really ideal at handling right now, accessibility and search engine optimization (SEO). As she notes, the general consensus about RIAs is that they aren’t as good at either SEO or accessibility. That’s starting to change, but as the ecosystem expands, we should all keep both of these in mind.

On the accessibility front, Adobe has done a pretty good job. All of our components in the Flex Framework are accessible with most screen readers. We also have a blog set up that discusses accessibility issues across all of Adobe’s products. If you’re looking at tips or tricks, this is an excellent start. We also have an entire section dedicated to accessibility on our main website with a lot of information for RIA developers. I couldn’t find as much information from Microsoft, but because Silverlight is still in beta, I think they’re waiting until the release to implement accessibility so they can do it correctly.

The search engine optimization issue is a bit more complex. People want to be able to provide relevant data from inside their Rich Internet Applications because they want users to be able to find the applications they’re building. But on the other hand, what does optimizing a search engine for an application really mean? Could you think of a way to make Microsoft Office search engine friendly? But if you’re a commerce-focused RIA or even a branded application you want search engines to be able to introspect what products you have or what information you have. For stores, you probably also want the link that the search engine finds to go directly to the product page instead of some landing. So essentially you want the data from within the app to be indexed AND you want the state of the application to be indexed. Andrea found an article by Avenue A Razorfish about this exact problem. They published a PDF on Search Optimized Flash Architecture (SOFA) that is a pretty good read for Flash developers and RIA developers alike.