Over the last week and a half I have been trialling the
video player with different groups of students. The groups were trade students,
students with English as a second language and students with a mild
intellectual disability participating in a general work education class.
It was nice to leave the computer for a bit, talk to some
real people and see them using the video player with ease.
The students were asked to watch some videos and after doing
this they were then to try to “break” the video player. Luckily no-one succeeded.
The students were later asked these questions:
- What do you think would
make the video player better
– there were no responses to this question other than “it was fine”, “it worked” and “it would be good if the video had little thumbnails so you can see the detail of what he is talking about.” (I pointed out that the second video actually had that – and this statement is about the video not the video player) - What did you not like
about the player?
– again the responses were positive. - Can you tell me what each
of the buttons on the video player are for?
– The common controls were identified easily. Some weren’t able to name the captions button but knew that it put up subtitles. No-one figured out what he audio description button did. I believe this is because they had no use for it (until later in the testing). One student suggested that the fast forward and backward buttons were skip one frame forward and back. - Are there any other
comments?
– “The subtitles were good because I can read English better than I can understand it”
After the feedback I asked some students, approximately half
of the students involved in the trial including the general work education
class, to use the player pretending to be blind, deaf or have a motor skill
disability.
For the students pretending to be blind I started the NVDA screen
reader software and turned off their monitor so they “couldn’t see” anymore. I
told them to use the Tab and enter keys for navigation. All students could
navigate the entire page and video player. These students also gained an
understanding of the importance of an audio description.
My “deaf” students had to turn down the sound on the computer/video
player or take out their ear phones. These students used the captions to
understand the content of the video. Some did need reminding to turn the
captions on.
The remaining students with “poor motor skills” had to
navigate the page and the video player without using a mouse. All could do this
without issue.
I would have to say the testing of the video player went
quite smoothly although three technical issues cropped up. Two quite small and
fixable and one appearing to be a browser issue.
Issue one:
When trying to change the colour of the captions in full screen
mode the Caption Settings dialog box is not keyboard accessible. I found this
about ten minutes before the first session. I believe this has something to do with
a variable being switched on while in full screen mode that makes it easier to
navigate the video player. This variable needs to be switched off when the
dialog opens.
Issue two:
Right clicking on the video itself reveals a menu that can
be used to control the player, in Chrome at least. Selecting pause from the
menu pauses the video but doesn’t switch the play-pause icon on the player
itself. Not sure about that one…
Issue three:
Twice the video froze. The students and I could not restart
the video without refreshing the page. I am not sure what the problem is although
it is likely to be multiple mp4 videos running on a single Chrome web page.
This issue was mentioned in a previous post.
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