I read an interesting article on SEOMoz today about how IE got sued and now all IE users must hop though a few hops before viewing any Flash or ActiveX content on the web.

…anyone using Internet Explorer now has to “activate” any flash or active-x element related to their website (EOLAS 521 millions lawsuit anyone?). This means that accessibility wise, our industry is now suffering greatly.

So if you are using IE and you find that Flash files no longer work and that ActiveX isn’t working either, it’s probably because you installed the patch (maybe automatically) and now you have to click on everything to activate it. Either you have to do extra work or the developers of each site need to implement a work-around.

If you’ve ever used CSS drop down menus and Flash on the same web page, you may have found out that Flash is always on top of the CSS. Well almost always, there is a fix!

Macromedia has a good tutorial on how to make a Flash movie with a transparent background. It’s quite easy and it allows for CSS drop down menus to drop down on top of a Flash file.

Basically all you have to do is go into the Flash publish settings, to the HTML tab and select ‘Transparent Background’ in the ‘Window Mode’ drop down. (I’m in Flash MX so newer versions of Flash may be sightly different.)