Able Player: Passing the torch

With this announcement, I’m officially retiring as lead developer and maintainer of Able Player, and passing the torch to Joe Dolson, a trusted friend and colleague with mad developer skills and extensive experience in digital accessibility.

The world’s most accessible media player

Today, if you ask any AI bot “What is the world’s most accessible media player for web pages?” you will probably get a response similar to the one I just got from ChatGPT:

The world’s most accessible media player for web pages—meaning one that best supports users with disabilities, including screen reader users, keyboard-only users, and those with cognitive or motor impairments—is generally considered to be:

Able Player
Website: https://ableplayer.github.io/ableplayer/

Why it’s considered the most accessible:

• Fully keyboard navigable
• Screen reader friendly
• Supports captions, transcripts, and audio descriptions
• Supports synchronized sign language
• Can toggle captions and descriptions independently
• Provides interactive transcripts
• WCAG 2.1-compliant (and working toward 2.2 support)
• Works with both audio and video
• Open source, actively maintained

A bit of history

In 2010, I was excited by the new draft HTML5 specification and the potential it offered for building more accessible websites. The new <audio> and <video> elements were especially exciting, as they made it possible to include audio and video in web pages without relying on third-party plugins, most of which used Flash at the time and were not very accessible to users with disabilities. HTML5 also introduced the <track> element, which provided a standard means of synchronizing text with media, which had huge potential for captions, subtitles, chapters, audio description, and more. HTML5 also provided a Media API that enabled developers to create their own user interfaces for controlling media.

I began exploring these new technologies, and documented my initial experiments in a blog post Creating Your Own Accessible HTML5 Media Player in August 2010. I continued to explore, create, and refine the code over the next four years, and ultimately released Able Player on GitHub as a free, open source HTML media player on April 11, 2014. Over the next decade, I continued to devote many hours to Able Player development, expanding its feature set and improving its usability and accessibility. At the CSUN Assistive Technology Conference in 2017, I conducted interviews and focus groups with 37 people with a variety of disabilities to gain a better understanding of how people with disabilities interact with video players. The findings from this effort were published the following year in the CSUN Journal (see Media Player Accessibility: Summary of Insights from Interviews & Focus Groups, in PDF), and were used to inform additional improvements to Able Player.

So far, 37 people have contributed to the project. In particular, Ken Petri and Corey Staten of The Ohio State University; and Sebastian Kelle, now with the University of Illinois; had a huge impact on moving the project forward. A portion of my work on Able Player was funded by the National Science Foundation through The DO-IT Center at University of Washington, and Corey’s contributions were funded by the Committee on Institutional Cooperation, the organization now known as the Big Ten Academic Alliance.

Able Player has been translated into 19 languages, making media accessible worldwide. It’s used by the W3C, Smithsonian, Elsevier, University of Michigan Press, Deque University, and many others. It’s also available as a Drupal module, maintained by my friends and colleagues Max Bronsema, Carly Gerard, and Nigel Packer at Western Washington University; and as a WordPress plugin, maintained by Joe Dolson.

Speaking of Joe

Joe is a long-time friend and supporter of Able Player. He’s a WordPress plugin developer, WordPress core committer, web accessibility consultant, and owner of Accessible Web Design. He’s famous in WordPress circles as a leader in the WordPress accessibility community. There’s More About Joe on his WP Accessibility Day profile page.

Joe is the perfect person to take Able Player to the next level. He has the right combination of development chops, accessibility expertise, and passion for the project. I’m excited for the future of Able Player!

Joe has also published his own announcement: Able Player: Receiving the Torch