In recent months, the issue of streaming video has been at the forefront of the web community’s conscience. This is due to the huge growth of sites like YouTube, which Google recently acquired for $1.65 billion, and the new phenomenon of clip-sharing and disposable video. YouTube recently rose to notoriety in Ireland when footage of a girl being attacked in Ballymun was posted on the site. The clip was subsequently removed when the victim’s father made an appeal on the Joe Duffy radio show.
These sites have given a creative and publishing platform to the user, but have also created a new range of usability and accessibility concerns for developers. In this article we will discuss the origins and evolution of streaming video, the growth of the Flash format and the accessibility issues that need to be considered if you choose to integrate streaming video into your site.
The early days
With the advent of high speed connections in the late nineties, web developers began offering streaming video clips on their sites. Streaming video offered developers a means to offer media files, e-learning and online training. However it also broke away from the best practices of web development and created new usability difficulties for users. These included:
- Multiple programs & plug-ins
- In the early days of streaming video, there was no industry-standard platform. Developers had to choose whether to offer their content with Apple Quicktime, Realplayer or Windows Media Player. The obvious consequence of this was the need to ensure that you had these three players installed and updated with the latest codecs.
- “Buffering…”
- Programs would often communicate poorly with the internet connection meaning that the clip would never play because the program was never set up properly. Similarly, compression techniques had not reached the standards they possess nowadays, so download times were long.
- User Experience
- Developers would often be forced to have their streaming media play in a separate window, or worse still, have it launch in an external application. Often the user would then have to make a bandwidth selection (100 k or 300 k), or become a member of the site. These all combined to create a very disjointed user experience.
The arrival of Flash Video
In 2002, Macromedia released Flash Player 6. One of the major new features was the inclusion of the Sorenson video codec which encoded .flv (Flash video) files. The .flv format was slow in its initial growth but over the next 2-3 years grew to become the market leader. Tom Green writes:
“QuickTime, Windows Media, and Real essentially lost the market when they got blind-sided by the growth of the web, fast internet connections, and, in many respects, the Standards Movement.”
In other words, as developers gained more options on how to implement their video content, developers realised they now had the opportunity to embed and integrate their video into their page and present content around it. This created a much more fluid user experience. Users viewing video no longer had to deal with the traditional annoyances that plagued online video such as Quicktime’s “upgrade to pro”, WMP’s “searching for codec” or Real Player’s “network error”.
Because Flash is primarily an authoring tool, it allows developers to develop their own interfaces and features, instead of being constrained to simply uploading a video stream file and then hoping the media player plug-in would play it properly. An example of an added feature enabled by Flash would be YouTube’s “related clips” that appears at the end of each of their clips.
Popularisation
The proliferation of Flash video around the web was driven in part by the huge popularity of social networking sites like MySpace and YouTube. These sites need customisable, rich content that loads quickly and without fuss or effort. The fact that streaming Flash video can be played on 96.0% of all computers without an extra download gives the format an added advantage.
At present you will find most of the major news and media sites are using streaming Flash video effectively. YouTube, MySpace, CNET and the NY Times are all well-known promoters of the format. Unfortunately many major news sites such as BBC and CNN spent years building up a database of video playable in Real Player or Windows Media Player, and so the transition to Flash will prove more difficult for them.
Accessibility concerns
Because you’re dealing with video content which stimulates the visual and aural senses, you’re automatically going to alienate some users with hearing and sight impairments. However, it is possible to compensate for this by following a few simple guidelines:
- All Flash video players should have an option to enable closed captioning or subtitling. This is because it’s an unfair presumption that all users will have the ability to listen to your audio track. This failure may be due to hardware problems or the user being hearing impaired.
- Often the primary message or content of your page is contained in your video, so it is essential to provide adequate descriptions for the video during the authoring process. This should tell a user with a screen-reader or mobile device what is being conveyed in the video.
- It is important to keep the interface and layout simple. Because Flash players can be designed by developers however they wish, it’s important to follow the best practice model and implement a simple interface with a well integrated play/pause button, timeline, closed captioning, full screen and volume controls.
Conclusion
Streaming video is no longer the major problem for user-conscious developers it was 4 or 5 years ago. While no one will try to argue that its use is user-friendly to everyone, there have been considerable advances made in recent years that allow developers to use the technology to compensate for users with access problems. By using an integrated part of the browser like the Flash plug-in, developers can take advantage of its market saturation and accessibility features to create a more fluid, integrated browsing experience for all.
Tags: accessibility, Flash, video, YouTube