![]() ![]() Yahoo! Test #1 – default user interface, with player minimized.But I had high hopes for the next player in line to be tested… Yahoo! Media Player As a result of all this, I abandoned my niftyPlayer testing, leaving my implementation in a somewhat incomplete and buggy state. And as far as I could find, nobody seems to be doing any further niftyDevelopment, and there’s little or no support for the existing player, either from the original developer or the user community. It doesn’t provide access to the volume control and there’s no way to seek forward or backward within a tune. There are a few other problems with niftyPlayer too. At this phase in my testing I wasn’t especially inclined to spend much time trying to figure out how to convert old code to valid, functional HTML5, although it looks like Bruce Lawson has gotten a jump start on this in his article HTML 5 Flash embedded and other validation errors. However, the classid and codebase attributes are obsolete, and probably a few other attributes as well. HTML5 actually supports both and (for the first time ever in an HTML spec). One lingering problem is that the code recommended in the niftyPlayer documentation fails HTML5 validation. So, I’m hiding the Flash Įlement using visibility:hidden (I can’t use display:none because that also hides it from Javascript). With the custom controls in place, I have no real use for the original niftyPlayer interface, and keeping it on the page clutters the interface with unlabeled buttons for screen reader users. ![]() If they have Javascript enabled, an empty element with id="nift圜ontrols" will be populated with fully accessible HTML controls, which when clicked will control the behavior of the niftyPlayer object. If users don’t have HTML5 support, nor Flash support, or if they have Javascript disabled, they still get a list of links and can download the tunes and play them (of course, I’m cool with that and trust that they’ll still do the right thing and buy my CD). Essentially it’s the same approach as the HTML5 media player: I create a list of links to MP3 files to serve as a playlist. The default player itself is not accessible (unlabeled buttons again), but its Javascript API allowed me to create a custom player that approximates the interface I created in my custom HTML5 Media Player, which I think is reasonable for fallback content.įor the technically curious, I commented the code extensively on the test page so you can see what I’ve done. The niftyPlayer is lightweight and easy to implement. So my next step was to start playing with each of these two players to see what they could do. A second player, niftyPlayer, also has potential because it exposes much of its functionality through a Javascript API (as does Yahoo!). Of the players tested, the only player that is at all usable to screen reader users is the Yahoo! Media Player. With no labels, JAWS identifies the various controls as “Graphic 1”, “Graphic 2”, etc., or in some cases simply says “Flash movie start. ![]() I started by testing each of the 10 Easy To Implement Flash Based Mp3 Players with JAWS 11, and found that nine of the ten players do not have labels on their controls. For users whose browsers don’t support the new HTML5 element, I need an accessible fallback option. In my previous blog post, I described how I created an accessible custom HTML5 audio player. If you’re more interested in outcome than process, see the article Putting it all together: Accessible HTML5 Audio Player with Yahoo! Media Fallback. And it does not seem to depend on the versions of Flash or web browsers the sites that have this problem do so with IE and Firefox, and with Flash 7 and 8.This was my second in a series of blog posts on creating an accessible HTML5 audio player. I don't think it's a matter of those sites having slower connections, as the download progress bars show that even fully-downloaded audio has the same problem. So if I keep moving the mouse over the button, the playback will be fairly smooth, but if at any time I stop moving the cursor, playback will stop as well.Ī couple of notes: This seems to be site-dependent some of my sites experience this problem, others never do. If I move the mouse cursor away from the flash component and then back again, I can hear another half a second. At any point during or after the download, I can click on the play button and only hear about half a second of audio. When a quiz comes up, I can monitor the download progress of each file via the Flash player's progress bar. I'm experiencing a puzzling problem with the Flash MP3 player, and hoping that someone may have some ideas on it. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |