Accessing FLV Player via keyboard

Have you ever tested the players accessibility under usage of a screen reader? I found no information about how interaction with the FLV-Player is supposed to work then and would appreciate any help with it.

As I am working on a project that tries to be accessible to different user groups I'm also concerned about blind users. These people are used to screen reading software, e.g. JAWS 7 (free 40min Demo: http://www.freedomscientific.com/downloads/jaws/JAWS-previous-downloads.asp)

JAWS also provides keyboard navigation in websites via arrow keys and also enable the user to access the flash object's buttons in Firefox! This is great on one hand but has the disadvantage that using the arrow keys is also bound to controlling the FLV-Player which leads to problems like muting or scrubbing the video while navigating through the player buttons :(
Also, the behavior in IE differs: the user can't access the player object with arrow keys here but only via tab button. I'm not sure if this is an JAWS-specific issue or if it's about how the flash object is embedded but it would be nicer if it was predictable how the user is supposed to interact, independent of the browser.

Another big problem for the users is that JAWS reads out some keyboard shortcuts that don't seem to work (neither in Firefox nor IE) and wrong button descriptions when navigating though the player controls. For example when the whole player object is in focus it reads: "Pause Alt+p btn", which is the very same as when the play button gets the focus (shouldn't that be 'Play'?), on the stop button it reads "Previous Alt+r btn" (shouldn't that be 'Stop'?) and when the volume control is in focus it says "Mute Alt+m btn".

I'm not familiar with designing flash applications so It won't be easy for me to adopt the FLV-Player to behave right. Could anyone help?

I'm experiencing exactly the same issues as Martin. If the keyboard shortcuts serve no useful purpose shouldn't they just be dropped? Blind users will still hear the name of the button and can press enter to activate the command. However, there does seem to be a problem with having the Pause/Play button as a toggle...

The play/pause toggle issue has been fixed in the 4.0 player (now using the 'p' button). There's indeed not much additional value to the keyboard shortcuts if one is able to tab through the player, but the extra keys are useful when that's not possible (e.g. Safari or MAC).

I'm working with a blind individual who is unable to play the example flash video embedded here using his screen reader:

http://www.jeroenwijering.com/?item=Making_Video_Accessible

He's using JAWS and Internet Explorer. As he navigates, he hears "flash content start" followed by "flash content end" with no option to list the button labels. Is this something specific to the embed method on that page, or a problem with the player itself?

I would like to know how can we navigate through the playlist using the keyboard controls and also can we make the playlist screen reader accessible?

How does the player work with screen readers?

Nathan G and I went over the accessibility example page: it's working great again (with Jaws).

The playlist is not supported through screen readers. Please use the javascript API and an HTML playlist if you want to have accessibility (JAWS will also be able to read the HTML playlist titles/descriptions).

@Jeroen,

I'm guessing that captions aren't supported with a Media RSS playlist since there isn't any way to specify a url for the captions file?

See this thread: http://www.jeroenwijering.com/?thread=13574 Robin's post on 25.10.2008. She is using a Media RSS playlist. After searchiing through the specifications and trying lots of "tricks" I concluded that there is no way to specify the captions URL unless you "abuse" the playlist specifications by adding a non-standard element.

You could put the captions in multiple media:text elements, but that is messy compared to having separate captions files.

Yes indeed. RSS and ATOM don't have a meta element, which makes it hard to support stuff like captions. Having separate media:text entries also didn't strike me as very useful, so the player doesn't support that.

XSPF, ASX and SMIL, on the contrary, have room for meta elements.

The Accessibility example video on the Making Video Accessible page uses JW FLV Player 4.2.0, and is read beautifully by JAWS 9.0. I'm using JW FLV Player 4.2.95, and JAWS 9.0 reads nothing. It's just a video with a controller bar - no playlist. JAWS announces "Flash Movie Start", followed immediately by "Flash Movie End", as if player.swf has accessibility disabled for all child components. Is this a known problem introduced between the two versions, or should I delve deeper into my code to see if I've done something wrong?

It's probably the same version (there's no 4.2.0), but perhaps you use a custom skin or have other embed code settings?

Back to Brad's Question...

Just wondering, how would someone using a keyboard (Firefox) to navigate the web be able to access a movie in the FLV player? At your Making Video Accessible page (http://www.jeroenwijering.com/?item=Making_Video_Accessible), I tabbed through the page and I skipped right over it.

Only Internet Explorer supports tabbing to a flash object at this time (Go figure!). It's rediculous but thats the name of the browser game.

Be careful not to code a transparent wmode when you insert some flash in a page :
<param name="WMODE" value="transparent" />
This makes it undetectable by assistive technologies...