One of the most trafficked posts on my site is not about web development at all: Changing YouTube Playback Speed While the ability to control playback speed has real value from an accessibility and usability perspective, mostly I was just sharing something which brings me a ton of value because…
Most of us in the accessibility biz (do we call it that? I think we call it that…) already know that YouTube’s default embed code is problematic. Specifically, the fact that the <iframe> does not have a title attribute is an automatic WCAG 2.0 AA failure. The Existing title Issue…
Last week Amit Agarwal posted a great tutorial on making YouTube embeds less of a burden for users, A Better Method for Embedding YouTube Videos on your Website. The abstract: Learn how to embed YouTube videos responsively and without increasing the page load time. The embeds are light and mobile…
This post originally appeared on the Algonquin Studios blog. YouTube gives users the option to modify the playback speed of some videos. This is particularly useful in the case of videos that you are obligated to watch (training videos, terrible fan videos, the occasional conference talk, etc.) and want to…
Yesterday Henny Swan asked a simple question on the Twitters: I'm curious to know, who uses subtitles on web content (X device) who's not deaf or hard of hearing? For example I did when breastfeeding.— Henny (@iheni) November 12, 2013 Adam Banks put together a Storify of the responses that…
On February 2, Microsoft released a plug-in for Chrome on Windows 7 to allow users to play H.264 video directly in Chrome. In addition, Microsoft has said that it will support WebM (VP8) when a user has the codec installed. And so began the fragmentation of the HTML video model,…
If you pay any attention to the plodding chaos that is the development of HTML5, then you’ve probably seen the discussions around the video element and how best to encode videos. Over a year and half ago Ian Hickson gutted the video and audio portions of the HTML5 specification to…
First off, let me apologize for ending the title of this post with a preposition. I am playing off an idiom, so I think I have some leeway. Besides, “You get that for which you pay” just doesn’t roll off the tongue. In the last week I have watched two…
Today Opera Software released data about how users of its Opera Mini mobile web browser use the web. Opera does this periodically to give some insight into how its users may be surfing, but what we don’t know is how much Opera Mini users correspond to the web in general.…
Image of the captions in use on President Obama’s speech about the Chile earthquake. If you’ve been reading my blog for a while now then you may have noticed my post back in November titled YouTube Will Automatically Caption Your Video. In that post I talked about YouTube leveraging Google…
With HTML5 on the horizon, it is becoming far easier to embed video on a web page than it has been. Sure, you can drop some code copied from YouTube, but you have little control over the HTML or the video output. Once you do have your video, you also…
Three years ago YouTube/Google added the ability for video authors to add captions to videos. Over time support for multiple caption tracks was included, the expansion of search to consider text in captions, and even machine translation support for the captions (see my other post about machine translation risks).Even with…