[wac] jwplayer controls, a fully accessible interface to the JW FLV Flash media player, is ready

[Ken Petri]

Hi All,

Apologies to anyone receiving this twice. This goes out to OSU
Webmasters and to the WAC list and there is some overlap.

At the OSU Webmasters monthly meeting last week, we presented JW
Player Controls, a set of accessible JavaScript controls that wrap the
JW FLV Player. We are finally feeling relatively comfortable with the
code and think it's ready for public release. You can read about it
and download it here:

http://wac.osu.edu/examples/jwplayercontrols/

The page also has information on captioning and providing audio
description for web video.

If you were at the meeting last week you'll know that at that time we
were using a cross-domain version of Dojo Toolkit for our JavaScript
controls. We have had to scrap the cross-domain implementation. We now
use a custom build of Dojo plus our own jwpc layer. The cross-domain
version of the Dojo Toolbar widget was having problems with JAWS in
IE. We believe we discovered the problem. In any regard, whether we
actually discovered the problem or not, we were able to solve the
problem by using a custom build. This may also improve latency
somewhat over the cross-domain served version.

The major limitation at this stage of development is that you can only
have one player on a page. At some point fairly soon we will be
turning the thing into a Dojo Widget, and we'll make sure at it is
capable of allowing for multiple instances on a page. We will also be
exploring ways to turn the toolbar buttons into CSS sprites. Right now
each button and button state is downloaded separately and there is an
initial hit on load time because of this. (The browser will cache the
files and subsequent loads will be quick.) We're also going to explore
internalizing the CSS into the widget, which should improve latency
slightly, as well.

(If you are interested in JavaScript development and are looking
around for a good toolkit, give Dojo a long look. The deeper we have
dug into it, the more riches it has returned. It is truly an amazing
set of tools, and--importantly to us--the basic Dojo Widgets (called
Dijits) have very good accessibility.)

We hope this player is useful in your development.

Enjoy!
ken
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  Ken Petri
  Program Director
  OSU Web Accessibility Center
  102D Pomerene Hall
  1760 Neil Avenue
  Columbus, Ohio  43210
  Phone: (614) 292-1760
  Fax: (614) 292-4190
  mailto:petri.1 at osu.edu
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