Converting Flash Interactives to HTML5 for the National Air and Space Museum

The Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum has hired us to convert three popular Flash interactives to HTML5 and make them ADA compliant and mobile-friendly as well. The redesigned interactives will be completed soon and integrated into the Museum’s main website sometime early in 2021. The content for one of the interactives introduces aviation principles that were discovered by the Wright brothers and are still applied to modern aircraft. The other two interactives reflect cultural responses to both the beginning of the age of aviation and the Apollo moon landings in the late 1960s.

Adobe Flash will reach its official ‘end-of-life’ on December 31, 2020. It’s estimated that 2.6% of the top 10 million websites on the Internet are built with Flash. That means at least 260,000 popular websites will be unavailable or partially inoperable in 2021. Apple began the slow demise of Flash over ten years ago when they would not support any Flash files on their mobile devices. This led to an expansion of open web technologies and specifically, HTML 5. Adobe decided in 2017 that it would stop developing Flash and ultimately, all browsers have announced that support has ended. Interactive Knowledge has been contacted by several clients over the past few years to convert older Flash-based websites or interactives to HTML 5. We’ve had success with this conversion process and expect to work on several new projects in the coming months. 

We have submitted a proposal to work on interactive conversions for the National Museum of American History and hope to begin that project next year. We are well-positioned to convert any effective educational interactives that are built-in Flash to HTML5 or other web technologies that are supported by modern browsers and can be delivered as ADA compliant and mobile activities.