Here’s a list a accessible HTML5 Media Players—I have not tested them all—and some articles on how to build one yourself. Know any others? Please leave info in a comment.

Existing Players

• Nomensa’s media player
• JW Player by LongTail
  • Making Video Accessible by LongTail
  • Accessible JW Player Control using Dojo by Ohio State University
• WebPlayer from Yahoo and the WebPlayer WordPress plugin Closed.
• The Workshop video player
• Acorn Media Player (via @ghindas, author of Opera article below)
• MediaElement.js (via @BruceL’s comment below. This is the one I forgot!)
• Video.js – an open-source HTML5 video player
• Able Player – accessible cross-browser media player by Terrill Thompson (GitHub)
• OzPlayer by AccessibilityOz
• Fluid Project VideoPlayer
• Accessible HTML5 Video Player by PayPal
• Plyr – by @sam_potts. Nice work!

Do It Yourself

• Accessible HTML5 Audio Player with Yahoo! Media Player Fallback by Terrill Thompson
• Practical Cross-Browser HTML5 Audio and Video by MSDN
• Accessible HTML5 video player by Dev.Opera

More

• HTML5 Video Player Comparison
• Media Player Accessibility Comparisons (Google Doc)
• Embedded YouTube Test by Terrill Thompson
• Media players and accessibility by AccessIQ
• Captioning YouTube Video and Providing Accessible Controls

Here’s a great list of music about web accessibility! Includes the premiere of the full Web Axe theme song.

• WCAG 2.0 Theme Song by David MacDonald (YouTube).
• Assistive Technology Boogie – fun, and it’s accessible Flash! (direct Flash link)
• “Man With Small F” (The Inaccessible PDF Song) by Terrill Thompson. Listen at end of Web Axe Podcast 77 (Interview with Terrill Thompson) or from Terrill’s album Flavors.
• inaccessible song by Daniel Davis.
• Listen to the Web Axe theme song! (MP3) composed by my good friend Jeff Ensign.

Anyone have a song to add?!

Dennis speaks with Terrill Thompson about a variety of topics including a summary of the EDUCAUSE conference; a preview of the Accessing Higher Ground (AHG) conference; community efforts to fix the web; HTML5 audio, video, and controls; and captioning.

Download Web Axe Episode 86 (Educause review, AHG preview, HTML5 audio with Terrill Thompson)

[Transcript of podcast 86]

Mentioned links

• Creating Your Own Accessible HTML5 Media Player
• The Quest for an Accessible Flash MP3 Player
• Accessible University 2.0 (test exercise page)
• EDUCAUSE IT Accessibility Constituent Group
• Mozilla Audio Data API
• DO-IT Video Search – even searches captions!

More on the EDUCAUSE Twitter backchannel

• View the E10 backchannel tweets on EDUCAUSE site
• #EDUCAUSE10 backchannel blog by Eric Stoller

News

• WebAIM: Using VoiceOver to Evaluate Web Accessibility (and also Using NVDA to Evaluate Web Accessibility)
• Topsy, a great app for searching tweets
• Tips for Designing For Colorblind Users
• Integrating Accessibility Through Design

Seems like there’s been more talk about CAPTCHA lately (stands for “Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart”). Most of us dislike the use of CAPTCHA in web forms. And all of us (I hope) can certainly agree that it’s poor in usability, and often times not accessible–even for any human user; see Top 10 Worst Captchas. Even so, it’s still way too common on the web. Damn spammers are forcing developers to implement this poor technique.

Fortunately, the collective intelligence of developers across the world have created many alternatives to CAPTCHA. Here are some great ideas from WebAIM’s article Spam-free accessible forms:

• Detect spam-like content within submitted form elements.
• Detect content within a hidden form element.
• Validate the submitted form values.
• Search for the same content in multiple form elements.
• Generate dynamic content to ensure the form is submitted within a specific time window or by the same user.
• Create a multi-stage form or form verification page.
• Ensure the form is posted from your server.

Here are some other articles about the (in)accessibility of CAPTCHA and other resolutions:

• CAPTCHA GOTCHA
• CAPTCHAs, CAPTCHAs everywhere
• Inaccessibility of CAPTCHA (W3C)
• Accessibility of CAPTCHA (Juicy Studio)
• CAPTCHA Killer
• Web Axe podcast on CAPTCHA

Example of impossible CAPTCHA:

In the post Test case: Speaking Special Characters from Access Matters, the author explains that proper markup for special characters is very important for screen reader users.

There are two excellent pages provides for testing special characters, for the character types UTF-8 and ISO-8859. Feedback is very valuable, so if you are able to test and leave a comment, that would be much appreciated.

We are interested in knowing how theses things are announced by as many screen readers as you folks can use. Please listen to either or both of the following test cases. Take notes on what you hear, and respond to this posting with your results.

For more information on marking up code for ideal aural interpretation, go to the Web Axe Podcast #58: Aural Style Sheets.