Category: audio

Accessible HTML5 Media Players and More

Here’s a list a accessible HTML5 Media Players—I have not tested them all—and some articles on how to build one yourself. Know any others? Please leave info in a comment.

Existing Players

Do It Yourself

More

Music About Web Accessibility!

Here’s a great list of music about web accessibility! Includes the premiere of the full Web Axe theme song.

Anyone have a song to add?!

Podcast #86: EDUCAUSE Review, AHG Preview, HTML5 Audio with Terrill Thompson

Head shot of Terrill Thompson Dennis speaks with Terrill Thompson about a variety of topics including a summary of the EDUCAUSE conference; a preview of the Accessing Higher Ground (AHG) conference; community efforts to fix the web; HTML5 audio, video, and controls; and captioning.

Download Web Axe Episode 86 (Educause review, AHG preview, HTML5 audio with Terrill Thompson)

[Transcript of podcast 86]

Mentioned links

More on the EDUCAUSE Twitter backchannel

News

CAPTCHA Alternatives and Articles

Seems like there’s been more talk about CAPTCHA lately (stands for “Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart”). Most of us dislike the use of CAPTCHA in web forms. And all of us (I hope) can certainly agree that it’s poor in usability, and often times not accessible–even for any human user; see Top 10 Worst Captchas. Even so, it’s still way too common on the web. Damn spammers are forcing developers to implement this poor technique.

Fortunately, the collective intelligence of developers across the world have created many alternatives to CAPTCHA. Here are some great ideas from WebAIM’s article Spam-free accessible forms:

  • Detect spam-like content within submitted form elements.
  • Detect content within a hidden form element.
  • Validate the submitted form values.
  • Search for the same content in multiple form elements.
  • Generate dynamic content to ensure the form is submitted within a specific time window or by the same user.
  • Create a multi-stage form or form verification page.
  • Ensure the form is posted from your server.

Here are some other articles about the (in)accessibility of CAPTCHA and other resolutions:

Example of impossible CAPTCHA:

Speaking Special Characters – A Test

In the post Test case: Speaking Special Characters from Access Matters, the author explains that proper markup for special characters is very important for screen reader users.

There are two excellent pages provides for testing special characters, for the character types UTF-8 and ISO-8859. Feedback is very valuable, so if you are able to test and leave a comment, that would be much appreciated.

We are interested in knowing how theses things are announced by as many screen readers as you folks can use. Please listen to either or both of the following test cases. Take notes on what you hear, and respond to this posting with your results.

For more information on marking up code for ideal aural interpretation, go to the Web Axe Podcast #58: Aural Style Sheets.