13 Making an accessible HTML5 video player - first steps

Early attempts at making an accessible video player have been quite positive, buttons are working and are accessible with a keyboard and screen reader. There are no keyboard traps and the video player works in all HTML5 enabled browsers. Embedding the video player on the page is still quite simple and no special Javascript initialisation is required. There are no HTML5 tricks or work rounds required to get it to work.

So what have I learnt so far? I've learnt about fullscreen video playback.

An interesting point to note about video players in fullscreen.

Before this project started many different video players were reviewed. One in particular was found to be very accessible though not at all accessible in fullscreen mode. When the player was in fullscreen mode all controls disappeared and it was possible to tab to other items on the web page that were covered by the fullscreen video. This was very confusing but it is true of many video players and in fact many HTML items that are shown in fullscreen mode.

Problem number one for this project; how to turn off access to all other tab enabled HTML objects when the video is showing in fullscreen.

It turns out to be fairly easy, anything that has a CSS property of display:none is removed from the tab order.  Javascript is used to 'hide' all items that are not part of the video player in fullscreen mode and 'show' them when not in fullscreen mode. Currently JQuery's toggle function is doing this work.

The video controls that are part of your player also need to move depending on the current mode of the player. Currently the controls that are being used sit underneath the video when in normal mode but when the  player is set to fullscreen there is obviously no room for the controls to sit underneath. CSS is used to resize and move the controls when the video player enters and leaves fullscreen mode. Again the JQuery toggle function is used to achieve this.

I am sure that there are other ways of doing this and I leave this post thinking about my next internet search "Creating a modal window with Javascript'.