After taking over Able Player, I received feedback from various sources about the kinds of problems people are having with the accessible media player. While there are miscellaneous observations of bugs and support gaps, the majority of comments were actually about using the player. These aren’t really issues with the JavaScript package itself; they’re about implementation.

The Drupal plugin already interfaces with Drupal’s media library. But the WordPress plugin was considerably less powerful – it could only implement Able Player through code. Even using a WordPress shortcode, the level of knowledge needed to set up a player wasn’t trivial.

It was clear to me that a significant update to the WordPress plugin was a high priority.

New Features in WordPress

Use AblePlayer with Blocks

Rather than add a custom block for Able Player, I added a feature to apply Able Player’s feature set to video elements. This means that you can enable a feature in the Able Player settings and build your audio or video content using native WordPress blocks.

  • Go to Settings > Able Player.
  • In the Able Player settings, update the settings to render video, audio, or MediaElement.js playlists using Able Player.
  • In any post, add a Video or Audio block. The Audio block only supports a single audio track, but you can add a caption to give your track a name.
  • In the Video block, you can add any number of text tracks. You can specify the kind, label, and source language of each track. The WordPress plugin will convert the tracks to be fully supported by Able Player.

Set Default Configuration

Also on the settings page, you can configure a variety of default settings that will apply to all your automatically parse videos. WordPress has some configuration available for the video block, but Able Player has quite a few additional settings that you may want control over.

Build an Able Player shortcode

The settings page now also features a tool to build a shortcode for rendering Able Player. You may not want to automatically replace every Video Block; but it’s still valuable to make it easier to build a basic player.

The shortcode builder supports adding one of each type of text track at this time: you can use the WordPress media library to select your video source, poster image, and one each of the available text tracks. You can also add alternative media, such as ASL or Described video sources.

Ensuring Fundamental Support

The shortcode probably won’t ever support every feature that Able Player supports. Ultimately, if you want total control, you can always insert a video or audio element in custom HTML (HyperText Markup Language) and get every detail the way you want it.

But up until now, the only thing you could do within the Able Player shortcode for WordPress was render a YouTube or Vimeo video. There wasn’t support for local video, audio, or even captions unless you wrote the HTML yourself. Making changes so that more people can set up Able Player with at least basic accessible content is crucial to improving the experience.

Hopefully, these changes will make Able Player considerably easier to use in WordPress!