An easier and more accessibe YouTube player
Date : 2008 05 21 Category : Tech & DevelopmentWe've covered the YouTube JavaScript API here before and especially the chance to write your own players in HTML and JavaScript with it. Especially the ext.js based one to one copy of the YouTube interface was of interest.
At the Accessibility2.0 conference in London earlier this year, Antonia Hyde of United Response gave a talk about rich media and web apps for people with learning disabilities and outlined a perfect media player for the needs of this group of disabled web users.
Whilst not ticking all the boxes, I took the YouTube API and created an easy interface for YouTube videos that has big friendly buttons and easy to use volume controls:
You can just add a YouTube URL to the end of the player URL to play the video or download the whole player to host it yourself and style it any way you want.
Check out the blog post about Easy YouTube player to get all the information and try it out.
What I found was that neither mine, nor the extJS nor the demo pages on the YouTube API page work in Opera, which means there is a bug in the API itself.
