YouTube is obviously a great site for video, but not for everyone as it contains various accessibility challenges, particularly keyboard access. The use of Flash itself to play the video can be problematic, not be mention requiring support of the Flash plugin. HTML5 is a pending solution (HTML5 video is available on YouTube as a “trial”), but in its infancy, HTML5 video has accessibility issues that still need to be resolved, as does HTML5 itself.
In the meantime, here are a few alternatives to the YouTube website which provide more accessible controls and a much cleaner interface.
- Easy YouTube – by Chris Heilmann.
- Your Tube – Accessible YouTube – by Dylan Neale, in joint venture with Povidi.com.
- Accessible Interface to YouTube – by Tom at majestyc.net.
If you still don’t have what you need or want, why not build your own interface?! The following are tools and resources for building more accessible YouTube videos including captioning:
- Accessible YouTube player controls
- Keyboard controlled YouTube player
- Captioning YouTube Video and Providing Accessible Controls
- Easy YouTube caption creator (Accessify)
- Captions and Subtitles (YouTube)
Further reading:
- Accessible HTML5 Video with JW Player as Fallback
- YouTube and the Push to Improve Tech for Disabled
- Flash and the HTML5 video tag (YouTube API Blog)
- 10 YouYube URL Tricks You Should Know
If you developed an accessible YouTube solution, or know of another not listed, please leave a comment.
5 replies on “Accessible YouTube & HTML5 Video”
It’s handy to have these links on a single page, thanks 🙂
Here are two more from my bookmarks:
Skinnable and accessible set of YouTube player controls
VideoCritter: A Simple Free Online YouTube Video Captions Creator/Editor
I would like to bring an accessible video-player-framework to your attention. I saw the presentation at the A-Tag Vienna (accessibility day). It has been developed for the website of the city-government of Vienna (Austria) and has been released under the GNU General Public License. The framework includes subtitles, additional audio-track for descriptive audio, possibility to integrate sign language-video, toogle on/off for the text-description, youtube-videos, flash-video with HTML5 iPhone/iPad/iPod fallback.
information (german only) and download: http://www.accessibility.at/practice/barrierefreies-video-player-framework
We developed a 508 solution for Business.gov, now on SBA.gov.
http://www.sba.gov/content/download-section-508-compliant-video-player
It’s a bit involved, but it does give keyboard access to the player controls.
Good to have collection of links over one page.Thanks for sharing.
The next version of MovieCaptioner will have a HTML5 SMIL/Timesheets export format that will write an HTML5 web page with captions. It should be available within the next couple of weeks.