[UACCESS-L] New prototype of YouTube currently doesn't do "ads, captions, orannotations", is that a problem?

["Robert Carnegie" <Robert.Carnegie@seemis.gov.uk>]

Headsup - I don't know where Google and YouTube currently are with
accessibility, but their next development appears to be this:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/01/22/youtube_html5_player/

> Provided you have the right browser, "HTML5 on YouTube" - 
> as Google calls it - lets you view videos without a Flash plug-in. 
> Or any other plug-in, for that matter. It does not yet support 
> videos with ads, captions, or annotations, but Google says: 
> "We will be expanding the capabilities of the player in the future, 
> so get ready for new and improved versions in the months to come."

If that means "currently no subtitles", it wants watching to be sure
that "new and improved versions" don't have discrimination built-in to
the new product - whether it is declared finished at some point, or
allowed to be an officially incomplete "beta" edition for years.

Also the player buttons should be Accessible... anything else?

Also for this trial service you need an HTML 5 browser that supports
H.264 video (so do accessibility questions apply to the browser and not
to this service, or to both?), so from what it says here, Google's
Chrome or Apple's, um, it's in Safari I assume.  Out of the other
"normal" browsers, Opera and Firefox apparently are only providing the
Ogg flavour of HTML 5 video support.  Microsoft, nothing at all, yet,
probably their own(?).  Linux - including Opera and Firefox Linux
versions - I don't know about, but I suppose open-standard Ogg is what
you expect to find there.

So this and other web-based video services probably need to have both
H.264 and Ogg provision at least, to be compatible with, um, in this
case, browsers other than the service provider's own one.  That may bear
on whether wider compatibility is considered a priority.


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