Accessible Video Player Template

An introduction to the Accessible Video Player, a standard Video Cloud player template that supports accessibility features for vision and hearing impaired users, including close captioning, screenreader support, and keyboard navigation.

Making your players and videos accessible for vision and hearing impaired users broadens your potential audience and is also required for many government, educational, and corporate applications. In the United States, these requirements are often referred to as Section 508. Captioning your video makes it more accessible not just for hearing-impaired viewers, but also for viewers who are not fluent in the language of the video.

The Accessible Video Player is a standard Video Cloud player template that supports accessibility features for vision and hearing impaired users, including:

• closed captioning
• keyboard navigation
• screenreader support

The Accessible Video Player is a single video player; it does not directly support playlists.

While the Accessible Video Player is available to all Video Cloud publishers, its closed captioning feature is available only to Video Cloud Pro and Enterprise publishers, since it requires using a custom metadata field in your videos. For another approach, you might want to use the Captions APIs in the Player API, which is available to all Video Cloud publishers, but which is more complex than using the Accessible Video Player.

Creating closed captions

To use closed captions in the Accessible Video Player, you need to create and host a closed caption file for each video. Brightcove does not create or host closed captions files. If you need help creating your closed captions content, you can contact one of our partners.

Closed captions in the Accessible Video Player must use the Distribution Format Exchange Profile (DFXP) format for closed captions. DFXP is an XML-based captioning format developed by W3C. It is an abstract document type of the Timed Text Authoring Format (TTAF) intended to be used for interchange among distribution systems. Like other XML formats, it is defined in terms of the element and attribute vocabulary. The root document of a DFXP document instance must be a timed text (tt) element. Make sure your DFXP documents are valid, including containing a valid namespace, as defined in the TTML specification. Note that we support  the lang, begin, and end DFXP attributes  and do not support style elements or styling attributes in the DFXP file.

Adding closed captions to your videos

Once you have your DFXP closed caption file, you need tohost it by saving it to a location on your server and associate it with the corresponding video. You do this using a custom metadata field. Read an overview of custom metadata fields.

1. Save your DFXP closed caption files to a location on your server. Brightcove recommends saving all DFXP files to the same folder.
2. Flash requires a list of trusted third-party domans for solutions that access files and plug-ins. In order for Flash to access your DFXP closed caption files, create a cross-domain policy file that notifies Flash that the location of your DFXP closed caption files is a trusted domain. For an example of how to create this reqired file, the crossdomain.xml file, see Configuring your crossdomain.xml file. For more on this requirement in general, see Cross-Domain Security in Flash.
3. Create a custom metadata field in your Video Cloud account to store the location of the captions files for the video. This field must be a text type field and must use the internal name dfxppath. For details about how to do this, read Creating Custom Metadata Fields.
   
   
4. For each video that has a captions file, set the value of the dfxppath field to the URL at which you are hosting the DFXP captions file. You can do this in the Media module, or you could use FTP batch provisioning or the Media APIs.

Figure 1. Setting the value of the captions file URL custom field in the Media module

Adding the closed caption module to your player

The closed captions feature in the Accessible Video Player uses a plug-in SWF module. After you create an instance of the Accessible Video Player in the Video Cloud Studio Publishing module, edit the player to set its plug-in URL to http://admin.brightcove.com/viewer/plugins/ClosedCaptionsModule.swf

Figure 2. Setting the URL for the closed captions plug-in module 

Using closed captions without custom metadata fields

Since custom metadata fields are available only for Video Cloud Pro and Enterprise publishers, this method of delivering closed captions won't work for Video Cloud Express publishers. Read about some other approaches you can take that do not depend on custom metadata fields and that are available to all Video Cloud publishers.

Keyboard navigation and screenreader support

The Accessible Video Player supports keyboard navigation. This enables users to use the keyboard, rather than the mouse, to control the player. Using the tab key, the user can move from component to component in the player, from left to right and top to bottom. As the user hits the tab key, the next player component comes into focus. If a screenreader is available, it either reads aloud the component's text or announces the component name. Once a player component is in focus, the user can control the component using the space bar (to click a button or follow a link) or the arrow keys (to change the volume or move the playhead).

Keyboard navigation is supported for all browsers. However, only Internet Explorer and Firefox enable the user to tab into the player from elsewhere on the web page or browser. For other browsers, the player must first have focus set through a mouse click within the player.

The Accessible Video Player supports the JAWS 12 screenreader on Windows 7. Read more about JAWS.