[Athen] Flash Video

[Sean J Keegan]

 > Is anyone working to create accessible Flash videos

Do you mean videos that are being delivered via the Flash player or do 
you mean a Flash-based video?

For instance, a majority of the videos on YouTube are delivered via the 
Flash player.  The Flash player is just used to present the video as 
well as allow for some interactivity.

In the captioning system we have put together at Stanford, we decided to 
use the JW FLV player, which is a Flash-based media player.  It has 
decent support for keyboard accessibility as well as supporting 
captioning, audio descriptions, and various media file formats.  We 
customized the JW FLV Player to include a "CC" button by default.  We 
need to do some additional work to get multi-line support.  Here is an 
example of one of our test pages:
http://www.stanford.edu/~skeegan/video/istanford/stanfordapp.html

I still keep looking at the ccPlayer from NCAM (see below) as well as 
the options that are being developed in HTML5.

Another example that has been developed is by DO-IT at the University of 
Washington - they have a *very* cool model.  One aspect that I like 
about their system as it includes search capability both across and 
within a video.  They have options for different JW FLV Players as well 
as the YouTube player and for including buttons directly on the page to 
control the video.  Here is an example of their system:
http://www.washington.edu/doit/Video/Search/index.php?vid=1

Another player that I like is the ccPlayer from NCAM 
(http://ncam.wgbh.org/invent_build/web_multimedia/tools-guidelines/ccplayer). 


Customizing the player requires some experience with Flash, but it looks 
like the documentation has gotten much better for making changes.  If 
you have time to "re-skin" the interface, then this is another 
Flash-based media player to consider.  One thing I really like is the 
ability to search within the video for information.


All that being said, you could also have a class lecture session done 
completely in Flash that also includes videos as in the following example:
http://ciswebs.smc.edu/cis1hitech/demo/CIS1ComputerConcepts.html

I am not a big advocate of lectures being done completely in Flash (as 
in the example above), but they have made it work and so is certainly an 
example to consider.

In most of the examples above, I have just addressed captioning as it 
relates to Flash-based media players.  You can also develop options to 
include someone doing ASL (by resizing the interface) and present both 
solutions.  That would take a bit more development and would require 
someone who is knowledgeable in Flash programming.


Take care,
Sean
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