Gian: Hi, my name is Gian Wild and I'm the Director of AccessibilityOz.
We've been operating for two years and today I would like to introduce you
to the world's first accessible video player, OzPlayer.
Web accessibility is about making websites and applications accessible to people with disabilities.
When it comes to online videos, this is about people with deafness, or people
who are blind or visually impaired, as well as people who have physical disabilities or
cognitive disabilities. So we developed OzPlayer to address the needs of all people with disabilities.
We've tested over 100 web sites in the last year and approximately eighty per cent of
those websites had a video player of some sort. Every single video player that we tested
was inaccessible in some form. Some contained keyboard traps, others couldn't be operated
via the keyboard, others allowed some operation via the keyboard but really important features
like captions and audio descriptions couldn't be activated via the keyboard. There are other
issues such as videos starting automatically and the lack of audio descriptions and captions.
So our clients kept asking us what video player they should use and we decided that we had
to build our own in order to meet this need.
Some videos contain keyboard traps and this is a known bug of Flash features within Firefox.
When a video contains a keyboard trap, the user essentially needs to close the browser
window entirely and start again therefore rendering the content completely inaccessible
to the user.
When a video is inaccessible to the keyboard, then users with physical disabilities such
as Parkinson's disease can't access the video content. We found in a number of video players
that video controls such as play and pause could be activated via the keyboard, but other
controls such as volume or activating captions or audio descriptions could not be activated
by the keyboard rendering these players inaccessible.
When videos start automatically they can be extremely disorientating to the end user.
This is when a video starts as soon as you open the page and this can be specifically
problematic to screen reader users. Screen reader users have a aural version of the page
spoken aloud to them and as you can imagine, if a video starts playing as soon as you load
a page then a screen reader user isn't going to be able to hear the contents of their screen
reader and be able to navigate the page - even to the point of being able to turn off that
video. So starting automatically, which YouTube does, is a serious accessibility issue.
OzPlayer is fully keyboard accessible. You can turn captions on and off, you can move
the slider controls up and down, you can change the volume using the keyboard only. We also
have a unique feature in skip links at the top of the video allowing users to skip straight
to the transcript or skip the video entirely. We have native keyboard controls and one of
the things that is unique within OzPlayer is the use of HTML5. We've used a variety
of HTML5 features such as the VIDEO and AUDIO elements. There are a number of features that
we haven't used such as the native Text Track API because it's not very well supported but
as the browsers change, we will of course be including these issues.
Of course video content can be made inaccessible at the source. So containing flickering or
flashing content can trigger epilepsy and migraines in some people. In fact I've actually
had migraine triggered myself when watching some videos. There are other issues such as
colour contrast and the use of colour. But of course the most important issues are the
use of captions and audio descriptions. It is absolutely essential that any videos that
are created are created with captions and with audio descriptions. A text transcript,
although not specifically required by WCAG2 is also an absolutely essential part of making
any video accessible.
We are really proud of OzPlayer but of course we are working to include new features in
our next version. These features include interactive media elements, sign language support and
extended audio descriptions.
At AccessibilityOz we're continually iterating and we would love to improve our video player
for all users. So please let us know if there is anything you would like to see in the next
version of OzPlayer