Re: Web video accessibility

Cliff,

Thanks for the detailed response and analysis!  I'll address some of your comments.

>Does it support captioning?
While the annotations could be used to manually input captions, EmbedPlus serves as an extension of the YouTube player, which inherently supports captioning. I suspect you already know this though.  The main goal of the annotations feature was to provide a means for third-parties to embed a video on their websites or blogs, and explicitly add their own timed text without having to be the YouTube user owning the video.  

>Does it support video description?
You mentioned the idea of opening a script document for those users that cannot see.  I suppose you propose that idea so that a screen reader could be applied on said document.  What do you think about the idea of overlaying audio clips instead?  That is, just like there is timed text (annotations), one could have audio clips that are played at given times when needed to describe what's going on?  The video playback could be paused during these audio clips in order to prevent mixing with the video sound.  

 >Tabs
You make a very good point about tabs and we will explore this.  Along these lines, we have instead played with the idea of hot keys for a version of the player that we built for a free application found to be quite ripe for the player.  It's a video-based pronunciation dictionary and word usage API we are developing that leverages the features offered by the player; check out: "How do you pronounce and use."  You can read details on the page if you want, but in short, a few users had asked if they could just push the left and right arrow keys for PREV and NEXT respectively.  We implemented this general idea for the left side navigation buttons on the version of the player used by the application.  You can try it out on a couple common examples and see what I mean.

- How do you pronounce and use gyro (in video)
- How do you pronounce and use salmon (in video)

Beyond PREV and NEXT, hitting the 'P' key plays the video, 'S' starts slow motion and 'R' invokes replay.  It would be nice to hear your thoughts on hot keys versus tabs.  I figure they achieve similar things, but hot keys provide the added benefit of direct access - i.e., no need to go in order of tabs.
Thanks again,
-Tay

----------------------------------------
From: "Cliff Tyllick" <cliff.tyllick@yahoo.com>
Sent: Monday, August 15, 2011 10:52 AM
To: "EmbedPlus" <ext@embedplus.com>
Subject: Re: Web video accessibility 

Tay, the link works for me in Mac OS X (10.5.8) and Firefox 5.0.1. I turned off my ad and pop-up blockers before starting this test.

Off the top of my head, I can think of these main issues for accessibility of a video player:Does
 it support captioning? (If I cannot hear, is it possible to display the
 text of the script or transcript as it is being said? It appears that 
EmbedPlus does support captioning, although the information in the 
captions includes very little of what is in the sound track, and the 
sound track does not include everything that is in the captions.)Does
 it support video description? (If I cannot see, can I open a document 
that, interwoven into the script or transcript, gives me a rich 
description
 of what is going on?)If I have no mouse, or if I cannot operate the mouse - and especially if I am blind -
 can I still get to and operate the controls? (Will the tab key take me 
from one control to the next, and can I operate each of them with the 
space bar?)Assuming I can get to
 and operate the controls from the keyboard, can I tell which control I 
am on at any one time and what I can expect it to do? (Are form controls labeled in a way that allows my my screen reader to announce the labels to me and allows me to recognize their function?)Assuming I can get to, recognize, and operate the form controls, is the tab order correct? (Does
 the sequence of controls I encounter when I hit the tab key match the 
order in which these controls appear? As shown below, it does not.)When I get to this page, nothing seems to happen when I hit the tab
 key. To jumpstart my review of your viewer itself, I used the mouse to 
start the video on the right (the plus
 view, not the standard). When I did, the captioning window opened by 
default. From there, here is what happened with each successive pressing
 of the tab key. When I indicate a function - for example, Next - that 
means that the function's control was highlighted by a yellow box. In 
this list, I've also indicated whether the control was operable with the
 space bar when highlighted:

nothingnothingNext (not operable)nothingPrevious (operable)nothingSlow (operable)nothingReplay (operable, but does same thing as "Previous")nothingnothingnothingGet (operable - opens in a new 
window, but nothing in the new window is highlighted and the first time I
 press tab clears the contents from both "Code" fields)nothingFull Screen (operable, but then Tab no longer works)More (operable, but there is 
no focus indicator on the new screen. And would I understand where you 
have taken me - what am I expected to be able to do here?)nothingZoom (operable, but I have no 
control over the area zoomed in on. I can't select the area to zoom in 
on, and I can't pan the shot once I have zoomed in)nothingRead (operable, but where am I?)nothingnothingClose Caption window (not operable)nothing (but cycle is restarting; note that the next three actions are same as first three)nothingnothingNext
I could not get out of this particular set of controls except by one 
irreproducible event that led to a highlighted progress slider. When I 
got to the slider, I couldn't operate it. And if I ever got to the other
 controls in that top row - Start/Stop, Sound, CC (which, apparently, 
will produce a transcript?), 360p, and Watch Later - I couldn't tell 
that I had.


So your viewer looks promising, but it also seems to me that you have more work to do to make it accessible.


Cliff

----------------------------------------
From: "accessys@smart.net" <accessys@smart.net>
To: EmbedPlus <ext@embedplus.com>
Cc: w3c-wai-ig@w3.org
Sent: Monday, August 15, 2011 9:20 AM
Subject: Re: Web video accessibility

the test view was
linux Ubuntu 8.4 and the browser was lynx

and the propaganda was all the stuff saying how great Embed was.

actually I didn't expect it to work, how do you get a basically video 
format to work in an audio/text system of viewing.

Bob

On Mon,
 15 Aug 2011, EmbedPlus wrote:

> Date: Mon, 15 Aug 2011 00:58:55 -0400
> From: EmbedPlus <ext@embedplus.com>
> To: accessys@smart.net
> Cc: w3c-wai-ig@w3.org
> Subject: Re: Web video accessibility
> 
> Bob,
>
> We have zero have any ads on the page, so I'm not sure if you are looking
> at the right page.  Not sure about the "propaganda" thing as well -- given
> my understanding of the word.
>
> What could really help is if you could you give me some info on your chosen
> browser on linux.  Information about the linux distribution would also
> help.
>
> -Tay
>
>
 ----------------------------------------
> From: accessys@smart.net
> Sent: Sunday, August 14, 2011 11:01 PM
> To: "EmbedPlus" <ext@embedplus.com>
> Subject: Re: Web video accessibility
>
> "does not recognize your browser"
>
> get lots of advertising and propaganda
> but no action
>
> Bob
>
> On Sun, 14 Aug 2011, EmbedPlus wrote:
>
>> Date: Sun, 14 Aug 2011 22:52:13 -0400
>> From: EmbedPlus
>> To: accessys@smart.net, Karen Lewellen
>> Cc: w3c-wai-ig@w3.org
>> Subject: Re: Web video accessibility
>> Resent-Date: Mon,
 15 Aug 2011 02:52:57 +0000
>> Resent-From: w3c-wai-ig@w3.org
>>
>> Which link?
>> Here http://www.embedplus.com/ ?    I haven't seen any problems on my
>> side.
>>
>> ----------------------------------------
>> From: accessys@smart.net
>> Sent: Sunday, August 14, 2011 9:34 PM
>> To: "Karen Lewellen"
>> Subject: Re: Web video accessibility
>>
>> got pretty much the same error and I'm running linux
>>
>> Bob
>>
>> On Sun, 14 Aug 2011, Karen Lewellen wrote:
>>
>>> Date: Sun, 14 Aug 2011 21:21:26 -0400 (EDT)
>>> From: Karen Lewellen
>>> To:
 EmbedPlus
>>> Cc: w3c-wai-ig@w3.org
>>> Subject: Re: Web video accessibility
>>> Resent-Date: Mon, 15 Aug 2011 01:21:53 +0000
>>> Resent-From: w3c-wai-ig@w3.org
>>>
>>> I just checked on this, do you realize the link here produces an unable
>> to
>>> connect to remote host error?
>>> Karen
>>>
>>> On Thu, 11 Aug 2011, EmbedPlus wrote:
>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>  Normal
>>>>  0
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>  false
>>>>  false
>>>> 
 false
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>  MicrosoftInternetExplorer4
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> Hi all,
>>>>
>>>> I'm the co-developer a YouTube third-party tool called
>>>> EmbedPlus.  It enhances the standard
>>>> YouTube player with many features that aren't inherently supported.
>> We've
>>>> been getting lots of feedback regarding
>>>> the accessibility benefits of some of these features like movable
> zoom,
>>
>>>> slow
>>>> motion, and even third-party
 annotations.
>>>> As the tool continues to grow in popularity, the importance of its
>>>> accessibility rises. I decided to do some research and found the WAI
>>>> Interest
>>>> group to be a major proponent of accessibility on the web.  If anyone
>> has
>>>> time to take a look at
>>>> EmbedPlus and share feedback that could help improve the tool, please
>> do.
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> Here's the link: http://www.embedplus.com/
>>>> .  If needed, I can provide further details.
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> Thank you in advance,
>>>>
>>>>
 Tay
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>
>>
>>
>>
>
>
>