A study of accessibility requirements for media players on the Web

Editor's Notes

• #2: Good afternoon. My name is María González and I’m going to talk about ‘A study of accessibility requirements for media players on the Web’ that has been accomplished at Carlos III University of Madrid.
• #3: As you can see, our presentation is divided in these points.
• #4: What has motivated us is that multimedia content has more accessibility barriers than other contents in spite of being increased every day.
• #5: To pass those barriers, multimedia content must be accessible according to standards like Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0 that in its guideline 1.2 set that user agent has to provided synchronized alternatives such as captions, audio description and transcriptions. That means, that user agents in general and media players in particular have to support these requirements, so they should allow to play delivered accessible multimedia content and therefore a positive user-video interaction. In order to get those points, media players have been developed according to (User Agent Accessibility Guidelines) UAAG of Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) and international standards like International Standard Organization (ISO) that is related to software accessibility.
• #6: If we focus on the standard under study, we have the UAAG 1.0 that is a recommendation since 2002, but to this study we follow the UAGG 2.0, although is still a working draft, is the version that we have used because it supports WCAG 2.0. By an overview of the kind of media players that we can find on the Web, we distinguish two groups. On one hand media players that do not open any application to see them, these media players have more controls and they are more accessible, however on the other hand we have others that are more usable because they do not have to open a software, being one of the most used formats Flash.
• #7: It’s because Flash has an excellent compression system that can deliver high-fidelity audio and high-resolution video without taxing bandwidth. Flash does not play in some platforms, leading to an incompatibility of formats among platforms, in this situation the new standard HTML5, that is still a working draft, seems to provide an universal solution, for instance, it takes advantage of the fact that it provides two labels, video and audio, that do not need plug-ins, but it does not support subtitles and audio description yet.
• #8: In conclusion to this point, it is necessary to satisfy accessibility requirements in media players, because they are still inaccessible and there are a lack of knowledge, guidelines and documentation.
• #9: Due to the above, we propose an agile method based on UAAG 2.0 to check accessibility requirements for media players and a study case using the agile method.
• #10: We need two steps to develop the agile method. First of all, we distinguish which guidelines from UAAG 2.0 are related to media players. After that, we group these guidelines according to accessibility features and set an order to follow them.
• #11: After distinguishing the guidelines, we obtain the results shown in this slide. As we can see the guidelines are divided depending on its conformance level.
• #12: In the following slide we show the fourteen groups, I’m sorry for the size, bus this tablet is in the paper. These groups are applied in the sequential order that is shown in the table.
• #13: If we pass to the study case, first of all, we selected three media players, YouTube because it is the most used media player on the Web, CCPlayer that belong National Centre for Accessible Media (NCAM) and BBC iPlayer that belong BBC. After selecting them, we evaluate the fourteen groups about them. Due to the time, I am only going to show four relevant examples of these groups.
• #14: The first one, Identify presence of alternative content, the success criteria are satisfied by all the media players. All of the media players have a button that allows enable or disable the captions.
• #16: The second example is Configure text. This screenshot shows a text configuration menu that allows configure the captions that appears during the play. These success criteria are only satisfied by YouTube Video Player.
• #18: The third example, Present direct commands in rendered content, is only satisfied by CCPlayer. This media player has a command menu to know different keyboard shortcuts.
• #19: The last example, Find, is only satisfied by CCPlayer too. In this case, media player has to provide a menu to find text within the captions during the play.
• #20: After the evaluation process, we obtain the following results: The conformance level A is exceeded by all media players in more than fifty percen. The rest of the levels do not get the fifty percen. As we can see, CCPlayer obtain the best results in all of the conformance levels, whereas YouTube and BBC iPlayer do not satisfy any guideline belong conformance level AAA.
• #21: As we said, CCPlayers obtain the best results and it’s due to it has accessibility features’ documents, commands’ menu, search, it’s compatible with screen readers but i have not found any example with audio description.
• #22: On the other hand, YouTube provides subtitles and there are some audio description examples, but these examples do not afford to turn off the audio description as the audio description is embedded in the video. Although the most of videos on-line are played by YouTube Media Player, it has different problems such as screen readers do not always distinguish the function of controls implemented in Flash and difficulty operating player control that cannot be accessible by keyboard. Although I do not have time to comment it, there are some works where authors are developing complementary technological solutions and there is also a beta version about accessibility features. The references of these works are shown here and in the paper.
• #23: At last, BBC iPlayer provides subtitles and 25 hours with audio description per week, although this audio description is also embedded, so we cannot enable or disable it.
• #24: To summarize, nowadays the access and the accessibility of media players are more and more important, owing to the fact, we have wanted to develop an agile method to evaluate accessibility features, an evaluation and the results of that evaluations. So, after this work, we can say that media players are not enough accessible now.
• #25: Before finishing the presentation, I want to tell us that in our research group we continue working in some proposal: Develop basic guidelines for professionals who want to embed video players on their Web sites. Define the required controls for accessible media player on the Web. Study of UAAG 2.0, coming recommendation. Study of HTML 5 support for accessible media players on the Web.   Some of these proposals have been accepted at INTERACT Conference that is going to celebrate in Lisbon in September.