For anybody who’s been putting video on the web for a long time and cares about accessibility, Able Player has been the feature leader for accessible multimedia. Created by Terrill Thompson, Able Player has been under steady development and research for well over a decade.
Originally conceived of in 2010, Terrill put 4 years of research into the accessibility of video and audio players before the first release on April 11th, 2014.
Now 11 years old, Able Player’s incredible feature list includes support for captions, interactive transcripts, synchronized ASL in a separate window, and audio description. It’s fully keyboard accessible, and is implemented based on concrete research with users with disabilities.
Able Player is used by organizations of all sizes: WordPress Accessibility Day uses it, but so does Elsevier, the University of Washington, Deque University, the Smithsonian, and many others.
It’s an amazing project.
I’m honored that Terrill has chosen to pass the project over to me, and I aim to keep moving the project forward in the spirit of free open source software and accessibility-first development.
Able Player Development Goals
My first priorities aren’t feature based; they’re about modernization. I have two initial targets I’m going to work towards: eliminating jQuery as a dependency, and building a new, more modern default design.
(No, the turtle and the hare are not going to go away. They’re based on research, after all.)
I’m not averse to getting some new features in along the way; but for the most part, those two goals are the initial priorities.
How can you help?
There are two ways you can help me out. First, you can contribute to the project. Want to refactor a function to remove jQuery? Awesome. You can also help triage the backlog of issues in the Github repository; I need to take the time to figure out what there is to deal with.
The second way is financial. I’m taking this on with no expectation of getting paid for it; but open source software is not free to the creator. It’s a task that comes with a lot of labor, and as much as I may enjoy that work – I do also need to continue to make a living.
The easiest way to support me is to become a Github sponsor. Until now, my Github sponsorship has been exclusively about making WordPress more accessible; but it’s now also about supporting Able Player. If you user Able Player, I’d certainly appreciate your financial support to keep this project alive.
To learn more about the history of Able Player, check out Terrill’s Able Player announcement.
Joe Dolson
Hi, Stacy! Thanks for contacting me. I can see that EAPM is running on WordPress, and the WordPress Able Player plugin is something I definitely have plans to improve. You’re absolutely right that the current iteration is too hard to use; it pretty much only suits developers at all.
I do have plans to update the WordPress plugin so that it is much easier to use, but I’m happy to chat with you about specific needs for your use case.
For other 3rd party uses, I don’t have any control, however.
Stacy Kess
Hi Joe,
I saw your post on LinkedIn, and came right over here. I am the editor-in-chief of Equal Access Public Media. EAPM is dedicated to building and launching media products and news outlets that are accessible and improving accessible work conditions in the news industry.
Here’s the thing: I love Able Player in concept. In fact, Able Player was our first choice for media player when we launch our first news outlet, the National Tab.
I say “was” instead of “is” because there’s a problem with Able Player: usability on the back end. For a news site, Able Player presents limitations:
1. It’s built mainly to be for video hosted on Vimeo or Youtube, even though there are ways to use it for self-hosted video.
2. It requires a lot HTML (HyperText Markup Language)-coding knowledge to use the player, which I don’t necessarily expect every journalist or editor to have. (In fact, we are building a style guide in which we try to make accessibility easy. If there’s a tag needed somewhere to make something accessible, we try to provide that tag in a way journalists can copy-and-paste it every time.)
I find for our needs Able Player would be too onerous to use in a rapid daily setting where every news story gets a video. If we are doing 10 or 20 news stories a day, or more, as of right now, Able Player is not user friendly on the back end.
As one of my accessibility friends put it, “we UX designers get so busy thinking about the end user, we forget about the those who are doing the work on the other side and leave a mess of code.” Yeah, ya do. It needs to be just as user-friendly to upload the primary video track, the ASL video, the audio description, the VTT, etc., as it is for the end user to use all those functions.
I am not a coder. In fact, I just taught myself HTML and CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) in the last two months. But I am happy to work with you so we can make Able Player the go-to player for what will become the most accessible national news outlet ever seen. You can read more about the National Tab on our website (though more people find that our donation page has the best description: https://givebutter.com/c/buildnews).
Feel free to reach out to me by email at [email redacted], on LinkedIn (/en/stacy_kess/), or by phone at [phone redacted]. I’d love for EAPM to be all in on Able Player.
Cheers,
-s-