HTML5 media player accessibility: the potential and the reality
In last month's W3C update I outlined some of the benefits of HTML5 that the W3C believes will have a significant impact on
how people will use the web. As multitouch, tablet and portable multimedia
devices become more popular the promise of drag-and-drop functionality and
standardised video could have a great impact on our productivity and
entertainment needs.
In
terms of accessibility, there are two key areas that HTML5 has the potential to
deliver: the ability for people with disabilities to use its new features, and
effective communication between assistive technology and the web browser. This
month we’ll look at the first one, and discuss the evolution of browser-AT
interaction, WAI-ARIA, in forthcoming
reports.
Accessible
media players
One
of the biggest issues for people with disabilities in implementations of
current web browsing is video integration. For people who are hearing impaired,
this means the availability of standardised caption techniques. For people with
vision and mobility impairments, the biggest issue is keyboard navigation to
actually play and control the video. With so many video formats and
integrated players, simply playing a video can be an uphill battle.
While
the new video standard offers great promise of improving and standardising
captions, the W3C believes the huge step forward for web accessibility is the
accessible embedded media player.
How
does it work?
Currently
websites like YouTube are difficult to use
for people with vision and mobility impairments because the buttons in the
video player, such as ‘play’ and ‘stop’, can’t be selected with the keyboard
alone. Although solutions have been developed, they are non-standard, difficult
to find, and it’s unlikely that the website a person with a disability wants to
use will have an accessible player feature.
HTML5
basically provides new commands such as
<video> and
<audio> which
can create and label the buttons in a way that allows keyboard shortcuts to
access them, and screen readers to tell the user which buttons are
available. This means a person who has a vision or mobility impairment can
easily use the keyboard to start, stop and navigate around a video, and people
who are vision impaired using a screen reader will also have words such as
‘stop’ and ‘play’ read out to them when the keyboard focus is on the buttons.
Can
an HTML5 accessible media player be put on my website now?
Given
that many web browsers support HTML5 to some degree, the answer is both yes and
no. It can be done, but because HTML5 is still an evolving standard and both
browsers and assistive technology products handle HTML5 commands in different
ways, it’s hard to create an accessible media player that will work for
everyone.
Having
said that, there is an excellent guide published by
Terril Thompson
that provides many tweaks and hacks that can get a customised HTML5 accessible
media player up and running.
How
are the browsers and screen readers going with HTML5?
In
terms of the web browser implementation of
HTML5, Opera is leading the way and has enough functionality to support a standard
accessible media player. Firefox 3.6 and Safari both work to some degree but
still need some development, while Internet Explorer 8 and Google Chrome do not
currently provide any support for HTML5 keyboard or AT accessibility. Microsoft
has indicated, however, that more work will be done on this for the release of
Internet Explorer 9.
As
for screen readers, the best result for Windows users is to use NVDA with Firefox, and
Mac users should consider the built-in tools of VoiceOver with Safari. JAWS for
Windows currently doesn’t support many of the HTML5 commands.
Where
to for HTML5?
The release of the HTML5 standard is currently
one of the W3C’s highest priorities, and all the browser development
organisations of Microsoft, Apple, Mozilla, Opera and Google are heavily
involved in the W3C. Although it will still be many months, possibly years
until the standard is officially completed, the browsers will continue to
evolve and accessibility will continue to improve.
New media
