Using voice commands in Flash

I've searched tons of post on using flash with voice commands, but most people responding assume the user is wanting flash to do the voice recognition which is not the purpose of this post.

I'm using windows vista voice recognition (WVR) which I want to control my flash movie and all I need are the very basic of commands. I've got some buttons executing with commands with no problems and no fancy tricks needed along with pressing keyboard buttons to type which means WVR can press the keyboard for you which then can be used by flash. So, using commands like 'ENTER', 'BACKSPACE', PRESS 'a' or TYPE 'abc' to type into an input textfield in flash all work fine. My two questions are:

1. Why will WVR not type full dictation sentences into the input focus field such as saying 'the dog chased the car'?

2. Is it possible to edit WVR so I don't have to say 'PRESS' or 'TYPE' to type out text on my computer, but rather just be able to say 'a','b','c','1','2','3' to get abc123 into flash's input textfield.

If I can get #2 worked around then I really don't need the reason for #1 for my purposes. Even though I would rather say 'friday' instead of saying 'f','r','i','d','a','y' but I can live with spelling it as long as I don't have to say 'PRESS' or 'TYPE'.

I know this may be more of a WVR question, but I'm still more interested in how it can work with flash. This really threw me off because I was under the impression WVR just displayed the text to the screen the same way a USB barcode scanner reads a barcode and will just put the characters into whatever textfield contains focus. That would be too sweet if that was the case, but Windows has to be coming with a fix for this (recognize flash input field) as the main reason for voice controls is for the impaired, but not being able to access flash content via WVR can make surfing the web harder than doing it without any hands. I'm thinking of especially sites that may have flash forms.

Ultimately, I was wanting to know the problem which then I could possibly come up with some workaround either in flash or the WVR sdk itself to make it recognize a flash input field. Please all solutions and suggestions are welcome. If your suggestion may cause more problems but will work towards a soultion then I would like to hear it. I will handle other problems your solution may cause when I get to it if your solution is one I can possibly implement. I just want to be able to input text into my flash movie via voice dictation. Thanks for listening, now stop listening and reply. :}

Well... I think the biggest issue is that items inside of Flash don't have "focus" the same way they do in your browser. In essence your browser treats a swf the same as say an image meaning that it can't actually be given "focus" by the browser.

That said, If you can get WVR to treat the flash as "active" then adding a tab order to the Flash form fields might get you closer to the solution (however you'll probably have to say "tab" to get to the fields in the first place) Details about tabindex

Unfortunately, accessibility is one place where Flash has long legged behind the rest of web tech so as of right now there may not be a good solution. Here's what Adobe has to say about it.

Very well put. Thanks for the links too. I agree I've always had problems with accessibility in flash. I'll keep exploring the angle of setting focus. I may have to go several years back to the way I used to setfocus in flash. I believe there was some code in the embed source that may help the browser to recognize the flash focus. I figured this problem would be alot of trial and error.

Please keep the suggestions coming.

thanks http://bannerflash.co.nr