I was asked a completely reasonable question today: what is it that the video element sucks at where Able Player excels?

The framing of this is basically “what does the native video element do wrong”, and that’s not really the point. It’s a hard job to nail down exactly what native video does wrong, and that’s part of why you’d use a 3rd party player in general.

The native video element is, in a word, inconsistent. Browsers have different user experiences and support for different parts of the HTML (HyperText Markup Language) specification. If you want to ensure that your users have consistent access to the accessibility work you’ve done, you probably don’t want to depend on native video.

Consistency

There are a lot of reasons to strive for consistency. If you want all your users to have controls in the same places, in the same order, with the same labeling, then an external wrapper is extremely helpful. When you add Able Player, you’ll get consistency with an accessibility-first approach. Using Able Player, you get appropriately labeled, keyboard accessible controls, with control surfaces large enough for easy access.

It also ensures that your videos all have support for the same features. You’re not limited by a browser that hasn’t implemented an interface to change a video’s speed, for example.

Full track support

Along with support for controls like playback speed changes, Able Player supports all of the available kind attributes defined for native video.

The `video` element specification supports five types of `track` files: `subtitles`, `captions`, `chapters`, `descriptions`, and `metadata`. No browser has native support for `descriptions`, but Able Player does. Most native renderers don’t support chapters; Able Player does.

The descriptions support is particularly unique, since it allows you to add audio description without needing to create a whole new video. Able Player will pause your video to allow time to speak the description, then resume.

Extended feature support

Able Player also offers features that are beyond the scope of the video element specifications. The navigable transcript feature is pretty amazing.

The “Navigable transcript” feature will merge your text tracks (chapters, description, captions) into a single navigable interface to explore a video. This feature is a powerful motivation to add these files to your videos. Why create video chapters if most browsers will never show them?

Another extended feature is the ability to have a synchronized sign language video playing alongside your main video. It’s common to have sign language embedded in a video. But embedded sign language is small, and can be hard to see. When you add it as a separate synchronized video, you make it easier for your users to see the video. You’ll also make it easier to add sign language interpretation after video production is done, which is great for your older content.

Check out the Able Player Demos

What’s the summary?

You should probably use Able Player. With the release of the Able Player WordPress plugin version 2, you can use it to replace the Video block throughout your site. This is a powerful improvement to video in WordPress. The Video block already supports adding all types of track files. But because it uses the native video element, many of those will only be used if you use a video wrapper that supports them.