My name is Dylan Neale and I, in collaboration with povidi.com, and help from code.google.com, have made an accessible version of the popular video sharing website youtube.com.
Why use this site
It is difficult to access the various controls (play, pause, mute, and so on) with YouTube's flash player.
Also, Because of the huge amounts of information on youtube web pages, it can be difficult to locate search results, user comments, related videos and so on.
Because YouTube has a huge collection of videos, I think it's important to create an easy method for VIPs and blind people to search for and watch them. This system could also be useful for non-computer-savvy people to access youtube.com videos and other features.
Accessibility Features
YourTube provides almost all of the features available via public YouTube. You can search for videos, watch (most) videos, view user comments, see related videos and brows video channels and user profiles. This website was designed with Accessibility in mind, and I hope you find it easy to use.
The following features help make the site more accessible and will give you some tips on getting the most out of the site.
Searching YouTube
Searching for videos is very simple, just type a query, select the number of results for each page and clikc the search button.
Search results are displayed in a numbered list, with the title of the video as a level three heading . This means JAWS users can navagate search results by pressing "h" (for next heading) or "3" (for next heading at level three).
To watch a particular video from the result set, press enter on the title of the video.
Hyperlinks to next and previous results pages are at the top of the page and at the end of the search results.
Watching a video
The video watch page consists of a series of video controls. These are button elements with shortcut keys and allow you to:
- Play/Pause a video
- Increase/decrease the volume of the video
- Skip forward and back 5% through the video
- And restart the video
The page also has information about the playing state: buffering, Playing, Pause or ended. You can see how much of a video has loaded, the elapsed time, and the current volume.
This page has more in depth information about the video, such as comments and rating.
acknowledgements
I would like to thank Darryl Sherwood at povidi.com for hosting this website, for teaching me how to use linix and doing all of the CSS work.
I would also like to acknowledge code.google.com for making youtube's data available via Python and video controls through JavaScript. and for providing good documentation and quic customer support.
The Python software foundation made the best programming language ever, Netscape and the Mozilla Foundation made JavaScript, and internet explorer sucks.