Web Accessibility Requirements for Media Players

Video Content continues to strenghten on the Web, because of that fact, it is neccessary to include video content with suitable accessibility requirements to be used by all people. User Agent (such as player, browser), also have to include accessibility requirements. In this paper a set of basic guidelines is included for professionals who want to embed video players on their Web.This research work is supported by the Research Network MAVIR (S2009/TIC-1542 (see wwwmavir.net/)), and GEMMA (TSI-020302-2010-141) and SAGAS (TSI-020100-2010-184) research projects

A Study of Accessibility Requirements for Media Players on the Web

Proceedings of: The 6th International Conference on Universal Access in Human–Computer Interaction (UAHCI 2011), held as part of The 14th International Conference on Human–Computer Interaction (HCI International 2011), Orlando (FL, USA), July 9-14, 2011Multimedia content covers the Web, and we should provide access to all people. For this reason, we must consider including accessibility requirements in a synchronized manner with the alternative resources such as caption and audio description among others. In addition, it is very important to take into account accessibility requirements in the player to avoid barriers and to ensure access to this multimedia content as well as their resources. This paper presents an overall study on standards and players with accessibility requirements. Moreover, solutions to improve the accessibility features in the YouTube player are presented. Based on this study, we have distinguished a set of guidelines to take into account for including accessibility requirements in players. Furthermore, we suggest an agile evaluation process which indicates the order of accessibility guidelines to check. Finally, the proposed evaluation method is put into practice with a case study: accessibility features are evaluated in three widely used players.This research work is supported by the Research Network MAVIR (S2009/TIC-1542 (see www.mavir.net/)), and GEMMA (TSI-020302-2010-141) and SAGAS (TSI-020100-2010-184) research project

HTML5 support for an accessible user-video-interaction on the Web

Multimedia content covers the Web, and we should provide access to all people. For this reason, it is very important to take into account accessibility requirements in the player to avoid barriers and to ensure access to this multimedia content as well as their resources. One of the most frequent barriers is the technological obstacle: the necessity for the user to install the required plug-ins in to order to access video. The new standard HTML5 provides a solution to this problem. However, it does not fully support accessibility requirements of W3C standards, including WCAG and interaction requirement of UAAG. This paper introduces an overall study of this new standard in relation to accessibility requirements for the players as well as an accessible HTML5 Media Player.This research work is supported by the Research Network MAVIR (S2009/TIC-1542 (www.mavir.net/)), GEMMA (TSI-020302-2010-141) and SAGAS (TSI-020100-2010- 184) research projects

Using multimedia to enhance the accessibility of the learning environment for disabled students: reflections from the Skills for Access project

As educators' awareness of their responsibilities towards ensuring the accessibility of the learning environment to disabled students increases, significant debate surrounds the implications of accessibility requirements on educational multimedia. There would appear to be widespread concern that the fundamental principles of creating accessible web‐based materials seem at odds with the creative and innovative use of multimedia to support learning and teaching, as well as concerns over the time and cost of providing accessibility features that can hold back resource development and application. Yet, effective use of multimedia offers a way of enhancing the accessibility of the learning environment for many groups of disabled students. Using the development of ‘Skills for Access’, a web resource supporting the dual aims of creating optimally accessible multimedia for learning, as an example, the attitudinal, practical and technical challenges facing the effective use of multimedia as an accessibility aid in a learning environment will be explored. Reasons why a holistic approach to accessibility may be the most effective in ensuring that multimedia reaches its full potential in enabling and supporting students in learning, regardless of any disability they may have, will be outlined and discussed

Synote mobile HTML5 responsive design video annotation application

Synote Mobile has been developed as an accessible cross device and cross browser HTML5 webbased collaborative replay and annotation tool to make web-based recordings easier to access, search, manage, and exploit for learners, teachers and others. It has been developed as a new mobile HTML5 version of the award winning open source and freely available Synote which has been used since 2008 by students throughout the world to learn interactively from recordings. While most UK students now carry mobile devices capable of replaying Internet video, the majority of these devices cannot replay Synote’s accessible, searchable, annotated recordings as Synote was created in 2008 when few students had phones or tablets capable of replaying these videos

Promoting game accessibility: Experiencing an induction on inclusive design practice at the global games jam

Copyright @ 2013 The AuthorsThe Global Games Jam (GGJ) attracts many people who are passionate about games development, coming from a range of educational backgrounds. Therefore, the event can be experienced by novices and student developers as an opportunity for learning. This provides an opening to promote themes and ideas that could help form future thinking about games design, emerging as a form of induction on key design issues for new practitioners. Such an approach aims to raise awareness about issues which learners could help develop and take with them into industry. However, the experience itself affords a deep experiential rhetoric and dialogue with experts that could be an effective pedagogical tool for issues seldom addressed deeply in formal educational settings. This paper describes an account by one such individual, being introduced to game accessibility through participation in the GGJ. As such, it is not intended as a rigorous empirical analysis, but rather a perspective on one way a game jam can be experienced, inviting further research on the topic

HTML5 video on mobile browsers

This paper reports on research investigating the current ability of HTML5 to play video in mobile browsers. Smartphones and the Mobile Internet are rapidly becoming an important platform for access to information anytime and anywhere. HTML5, the new HTML standard incorporates features like video playback that have been previously dependent on third-party browser plug-ins but there are no browsers that currently provide 100% support for HTML5. All the tests reported in this paper were carried out using smartphones with screen sizes 3.0 to 4.8 inches and the ability to replay videos of a range of formats, move directly to time points in the video and display closed captions were investigated. Key findings were that: video cannot be started programmatically; only selecting on the screen can trigger playback; no visual elements sitting over the <video> will receive click events while the video is visible (playing or paused); there are many HTML5 video players but MediaElement.js was found to currently be the open source player satisfying the greatest number of requirements

Visualization of Accessible Multimedia Content in Web Pages

Multimedia content still presented on the web sites. The visualization of multimedia content by the users with disabilities, those that usually use screen readers, is extremely difficult. With the onset of the audio sequence of multimedia presentation it is difficult for users with visual impairs to listen the audio component of presentation and the audio version of the screen readers too, because the two audio streams cannot be controlled using only one volume control. Therefore, because of the difficulties to control the available audio streams and because of the difficulties to access the control buttons by people with disabilities, the multimedia content is often inaccessible for users with visual problems. More than this, the use of dynamic users’ interfaces is a critical problem because the screen-readers cannot detect the dynamics in content changes. The current paper presents some solutions for multimedia content production and distribution in distributed multimedia web presentations.Accessible multimedia content, Synchronized Accessible Media Interchange

Raising awareness of the accessibility challenges in mathematics MOOCs

MOOCs provide learning environments that make it easier for learners to study from anywhere, at their own pace and with open access to content. This has revolutionised the field of eLearning, but accessibility continues to be a problem, even more so if we include the complexity of the STEM disciplines which have their own specific characteristics. This work presents an analysis of the accessibility of several MOOC platforms which provide courses in mathematics. We attempt to visualise the main web accessibility problems and challenges that disabled learners could face in taking these types of courses, both in general and specifically in the context of the subject of mathematics