We often get asked about the origins of the Blind Bargains web player, so rather than us talk about it, we went straight to the source. J.J. speaks with Terrill Thompson, Technology Accessibility Specialist at the University of Washington, to learn about the development of Able Player including some of the advanced techniques used for creating accessible videos including audio-described content. The player is free to use for your website and also works with YouTube videos.
Terrill also hosts an annual accessible NCAA tournament bracket which you can fill out and use to follow the tournament and compete against your friends.
CSUN 2019 coverage is Brought to you by AFB AccessWorld.
For the latest news and accessibility information on mainstream and access technology, Apple, Google, Microsoft, and Amazon offerings, access technology book reviews, and mobile apps, and how they can enhance entertainment, education and employment, log on to AccessWorld, the American Foundation for the Blind's free, monthly, online technology magazine. Visit www.afb.org/aw.
Transcript
We strive to provide an accurate transcription, though errors may occur.
Hide transcriptTranscribed By Grecia Ramirez
Direct from Anaheim, it’s blindbargains.com coverage of CSUN 2019, brought to you by AFB AccessWorld.
For the latest news and accessibility information on mainstream and access technology; Apple, Google, Microsoft, and Amazon offerings; access technology book reviews and mobile apps and how they can enhance entertainment, education, and employment, log onto AccessWorld, the American Foundation for the Blind’s free monthly online technology magazine, www.afb.org/aw.
Now, here’s J.J. Meddaugh.
J.J. MEDDAUGH: Blind Bargains 2019 at CSUN. I have found Terrill Thompson, who is the Technology Accessibility Specialist at the University of Washington. And the reason that we have him out – well, couple reasons – but one is many people have asked us over the years, hey. Where did you get that awesome web player for the site? Well, Terrill is the reason we have that.
Welcome to the podcast.
TERRILL THOMPSON: Thank you. It’s good to be here.
JM: So that’s called AblePlayer. And why don’t you go ahead and tell people a little bit about how that all got started.
TT: Okay. Well, it originated back in the early days of HTML5, when HTML5 first came out. It offered the new audio tag and the new video tag, which made it possible to add audio and video to webpages natively so we didn’t have to have flash players and other third-party plugins in order to play media. And it also included the track tag, which made it possible to add captions and audio description that’s text-based and lots of other features that can benefit accessibility.
And so I immediately was intrigued by that, but it has taken a while. Even now – many years later, actually, browsers still don’t fully support the HTML5 spec, the accessibility features that are available for audio and video. So that was really -- kind of -- the incentive was to just play around with what the HTML5 spec offered and to build a player that would be standards-based. So it’s just valid HTML, but that has your full accessibility baked in.
So it started as an audio player, and then – and that was a private project, just something I was working on on my own time.
JM: Okay.
TT: And the work that I do -- because we produce a lot of videos and we want all those videos to be accessible and we’re always looking for innovative ways to deliver that accessible video, then expanding what I had already done with audio made perfect sense with the grant-funded prompts that we had. And so then, AblePlayer became a video player. It’s the only video player now, still, that supports all five types, or kinds, of HTML5 track elements. And so HTML5 has the track tag, and the track tag has the kind attribute, which allows you to specify what kind of track this is. And so there’s kind equals captions, kind equals subtitles. There’s also kind equals divisions and kind equals chapters and kind equals metadata. And so those latter three are the ones that no browser supports.
JM: Still?
TT: Still. And no other media player that I’m aware of supports them either. Chapters is really handy because you can add structure to a video. So if you got a longer video and you want to break it up into different segments, that really is super handy, so –
JM: Sure some podcasts do that.
TT: Yeah. So that makes it possible. And in each of these track tags is a WebVTT file – that’s a separate W3C specification. And it’s just timed text. So very simple to produce, they’re all the same format.
The one that we’re really interested in exploring actively is descriptions. That – audio description, historically, has been something where you script it, and you then record voiceover narration and then mix in, in some way, with the program audio. And it’s really a professional skill, and typically it’s outsourced. And it costs quite a bit of money if you do a lot of it. But we, in the university, really are wanting to make audio description widely available. There’s a big need for it. We’ve got, you know, videos that aren’t accessible. And so – yeah. We’re trying to get buy-in for making our video accessible. We’re starting to get that with captions, but descriptions is a whole new realm.
And so one of the things that text-based description does is it makes it really easy to produce descriptions, as long as the scripting isn’t too difficult. If it’s just a case where, you know, maybe there’s some on-screen text that isn’t verbalized and so that needs to be made accessible; or maybe it’s a lecture, the professor’s demonstrating and didn’t properly describe what they were doing, then, you know, that could be described really easily. And all you got to do is type it.
JM: So would the goal – yeah. So would the goal be to – yeah – to find a simple way or a simpler way for people to create audio-described content? In other words, you don’t need to be a professional to add these simple types of descriptions?
TT: Exactly. Yeah. And so we’ve developed a flowchart. It’s kind of a work in progress, but – an audio description flowchart where you, sort of – you’ve produced a video. Now, you need to think about the content that you’ve produced and figure out what your audio description needs are. So, you know, if the video is fully accessible, just by audio alone, then you don’t need description. But if you’ve got some information that’s communicated only visually, you’ve got to describe that. And so then, the question is can I do it myself or do I need to send it out to a professional. And so we got some questions that we ask that sort of guide people through that process.
JM: Now, you were talking a couple minutes ago about text-based audio description versus produced, and I can see advantages both ways. Text-based might be actually really good for deaf-blind people or people using a Braille Display, where the produced -- sometimes, you could have more feeling, and there are other advantages to that.
TT: True. Yeah. Yeah. So those are –
Well, so back to AblePlayer then. AblePlayer supports both. And so we want to give the author flexibility in how they deliver their description, you know. If they produce text-based description, then that text is exposed at the right time – again, it’s a track tag, and it’s a time-stamped text file. And so we know when the description is supposed to happen, and at that moment, we expose it. The technical details are it’s exposed via an aria-live region, and so screen readers will announce that at the appropriate time.
So -- but we also support a separate video. So if somebody has two videos, they’ve got a version without audio description and a version with audio description, then you can toggle between the two. There’s a "Description on” button. Visually, it’s the letter, D, kind of, you know, the standard description symbol. But you select that, and it toggles the version of the video that you see. And it supports YouTube as well, so you can have a YouTube – two versions both uploaded to YouTube. YouTube doesn’t provide any sort of means of syncing those so that one is actually, you know, explicitly associated with the other, but with AblePlayer, you can do that with the two YouTube videos. You can have a – one that’s a nondescribed source file, and the other that is a described source file and the one that actually gets delivered to the user depends on whether the user has their description button toggled on or not.
JM: So even with the YouTube video, you will get the AblePlayer player for YouTube, or how does that work?
TT: Yeah. Yeah. That’s correct.
JM: So if I am a website owner, and I want to put more accessible experience on my website – we did this with the audio player for Blind Bargains and, of course, with the video player – how much of a leap is that for a novice or intermediate web developer? How would they go about that?
TT: If they are a web developer, then I’d like to think it’s pretty easy. And that is if they, you know, if they are a little bit comfortable with code. But the instructions are provided on the AblePlayer homepage. And so all you really got to do is follow instructions. There’s some code that you could just copy and paste, and then it’s ready to roll. If you’re not a web developer, but you’re more of a content person, then we’re actually working on that too, just trying to get more adoption. There is a rudimentary WordPress plugin and a rudimentary Drupal module, and those are both being actively improved upon. And so – yeah. We’re hoping to see – to just make it easier for site owners to add accessible video to their sites using those two content management systems.
JM: And you were telling me before we started the recording, it’s all open-source as well, if people want to contribute or –
TT: Right. True. It’s on GitHub. And so anybody that knows that world – there are actually lots of ways that people can contribute. Just filing bugs is a way that some people contribute. And also language translation. It’s been translated into about a dozen different languages. And so if somebody’s multilingual and knows a language that it hasn’t been translated into, we got all the text prompts in a single translation file, and so all they got to do is take that file and translate it into another language.
JM: What’s the website for people to get more information about AblePlayer?
TT: Well, probably the easiest way to get there is just search AblePlayer and you’ll find it. But it is on gitHub, and that URL is ableplayer@github.io/ableplayer, and AblePlayer’s all one word with no hyphens or dashes or underscores.
JM: AblePlayer at or AblePlayer dot?
TT: ableplayer.github.io/ableplayer.
JM: Perfect.
Now, when you’re done watching all of these videos or listening to audio, well, you might just want to sit back and watch some sports. Hey. It’s March Madness coming up right about now, and for the past several years, you have had another, kind of side gig producing a really cool accessible NCAA tournament bracket. Tell us about that.
TT: Yeah. This started in 2006, I believe.
JM: Wow.
TT: So I think, 13 years now. And it originated -- this will have to go way back, because I’ve always been a basketball junkie. I grew up in a town in Indiana where we have the world’s largest high school field house that seats almost 10 thousand people and would routinely sell out for Friday night high school basketball games. So basketball’s in my blood. And I really love March Madness. And when the tournament pairings are announced on Sunday, this. It's going to be just the Sunday of this week -- it’s really an exciting time for me because I love just finding out who’s going to be playing who and then speculating on who’s going to be playing who in later rounds. So it’s really, you know, a fun thing to kind of look ahead in the tournament and say, oh, well, Duke and Carolina might be playing, you know, in the third round, and that’ll be a fun one to watch if it happens. And then to sort of study the bracket.
And visually, a bracket appears mostly with a bunch of lines that are connecting, you know, to other games. But the challenge for somebody who’s nonvisual is, you know, how do I study a bracket and think ahead and, you know, analyze all those bits and pieces, and so –
JM: Especially if you do not know all of the pairings and who would play who and –
TT: Exactly. Yeah.
JM: -- even trying to think all that through.
TT: Yeah. And so that was the challenge that I have contemplated ever since I’ve been in the accessibility field and finally took action on it in 2006, was – you know, I’ve got a lot of friends who are, you know, basketball fans that are not visual. And, you know, I wanted to build something that they could utilize to have the same experience. And so you got a shared March Madness experience. And so, the bracket itself was how this all started. It was taking a visual bracket – and it still looks like a visual bracket. It’s HTML with CSS that presents it in a way that looks just like any other bracket. But behind the scenes is some well-structured HTML code using headings and lists that describes the, you know, the nature of your relationships between all the teams and all the games. And so somebody can navigate this from round to round and region to region and really study the bracket with the screen reader in the same way that I study it visually.
So that was the vision. And as it turns out, it really is pretty simple to pull that off. And, you know, it’s kind of built as a prototype, with the hope being that other brackets would follow suit and -- you know, I’ve reached out to ESPN and CBS Sports and NCAA.com and tried to get them to integrate some of the things that I’ve done, but so far, most of the brackets out there are still pretty inaccessible, unfortunately.
And so as I keep this up every year, I, you know, build a new bracket. And originally, it was just the bracket itself. But then I started getting requests for a tournament pool, because most of those are inaccessible as well. And so now, I’ve got an interactive site, and have had for a number of years, where people can log in and fill out – anybody can do this – log in, create an account, fill out a bracket, and then you compete with everybody else who’s there. But it also supports groups, so if you wanted a, you know, priority pool, you could set that up too and invite, you know, select people and have your own little thing.
So it grows every year. Last year, we had over a hundred participants and –
JM: Wow.
TT: -- and a lot of groups. A lot of companies that have blind employees are starting to embrace this and create accounts and set up their own private pools for -- you know, that allows their employee to participate. So it’s pretty cool.
JM: And having done the mainstream brackets – and I’ll do them here and there – the experience on this thing is so much simpler because there, you’re kind of doing a lot of guessing and going back and forth and remembering and, like, okay. Who does this team now play, and – you know, it’s just so much simpler when you create things accessibly from the start, which is, of course, what you’re trying to show people.
TT: Right. Yeah. And I’ve tried to – a few years ago, I tried a little bit of a departure, because it – you know, I kind of hate that this is, in some ways, a segregated site, you know. This shouldn’t be a separate accessible bracket. It – you know, all the other brackets should be accessible. So like I say, I’ve reached out to those companies. I haven’t gotten any sort of response. But I also tried creating – at the time, I created a Greasemonkey script a few years ago, which would be a plugin on Firefox that somebody would have to use that would modify the code of an existing site. So I think I did ESPN and tried to modify their bracket so that it was accessible and somebody could use it. And so I’m actually kind of working on that again this year as a side thing. So it’s not going to replace the bracket that I do, but it would be a supplement. And this time, it would be a bookmarklet so that it would work in any browser. The user doesn’t have to use Firefox. They can use, you know, Chrome or IE.
JM: Uh-huh.
TT: You know, whatever they want to use. But it would modify the code on a mainstream site, maybe ESPN, maybe CBS Sports, maybe FOX Sports, maybe NCAA.com or -- you know, those are the top bracket sites, I think. And somebody can get a somewhat accessible experience on those sites. So if they happen to be using those sites anyway or they know people that have invited them to participate in a, you know, pool with those sites, then, you know, they would be able to. So I’ve –
JM: Hey. You can –
TT: -- run into some challenges with that.
JM: Yeah.
TT: Because the sites are so inaccessible, it really is hard to fix them. But I’m hoping to have at least a little something that makes it a bit more usable experience, and that would be available on the main bracket site, there’ll be a, you know, some sort of promotional plug for them.
JM: And what’s the address for that?
TT: That’s my name, Terrill Thompson.com/ncaa. That’s where you can access the bracket and whatever I come up with in the way of a bookmarklet will be linked from there as well.
JM: That’s T-e-r-r-i-l-l.
TT: Yup.
JM: T-h-o-m-p-s-o-n.
TT: Right.
JM: Dot com, slash NCAA.
TT: Correct. Yeah.
JM: Awesome. We’ll definitely try to get some people to sign up for that. And hey. You could never do too many brackets, man.
TT: Yeah. Well, the nice thing about making the others accessible too is that mine’s a no-money pool, you know. It’s just bragging rights. A lot of fun, but –
JM: You don’t have a 15 thousand-dollar prize for the winner of your pool?
TT: Unfortunately, I don’t. But if, you know –
JM: Well –
TT: -- you want the big money, you’re going to have to play, you know, on ESPN and – or, you know, one of the other sites, and they’re not particularly accessible. So hopefully, the bookmarklet will at least make that possible.
JM: Well, thank you so much for coming on. Hopefully, this helps with some of our listeners that have been asking about where the awesome web player came from and then, also, the tournament bracket as well. I do appreciate you sharing and your patience.
See, the listeners don’t realize, sometimes, things happen. And we had to run over the middle of this interview and get batteries from the gift shop because my recorder died. So there you go. I appreciate your patience and –
TT: Sure thing.
JM: -- your willingness to talk to us today.
TT: But now, JJ knows where to get all the good stuffed Disney dolls, so –
JM: That is true. But I might – I’m out of money because the batteries were 11 bucks. I got to win the tournament pool now. So –
Thanks Terrill.
TT: You bet.
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J.J. Meddaugh is an experienced technology writer and computer enthusiast. He is a graduate of Western Michigan University with a major in telecommunications management and a minor in business. When not writing for Blind Bargains, he enjoys travel, playing the keyboard, and meeting new people.
