I just finished my sesssion at BarCamp Brighton about making online video more accessible by allowing for sensible, time-based commenting which could become a poor man’s captioning in a second stage. In general it is just showing off my hack of the YouTube player using their API.
One thing that has been annoying me for ages is that no video player on the web allows you to write comments for a specific time in the video that get displayed as plain text. Viddler allows you to comment at a certain time and it appears in the video, but the benefits of time based captioning both in terms of accessibility and SEO didn’t quite transpire to any video site maintainers yet. Edit: Darn, I hadn’t looked at Viddler for a long time, it actually does this now, well done!
Google just released a JavaScript API for YouTube which makes it dead easy to control a video with JavaScript. You can start, stop and jump to a certain time of the video but more importantly – you have events firing when something happens to the player. This made it easy for me to whip up a proof of concept how time-based captioning might work as an interface. Click the screenshot to see it in action.
Start the video and hit the pause button to add a new caption. You can delete captions by hitting the x links and you can jump back to the section of the video by clicking the time stamp.
Check the source for how it is done. In order to make this a service, all you need to do is have a backend script that gets all the form fields and store it in a DB.
The lovely chaps from Northcast have edited and uploaded the video of my talk at GeekUp Leeds about JavaScript and the YUI.
I especially like that they went through the whole story, right from me arriving handing over the schwag and being hugged by mysterious flatcapped Northern beauties, including the whole talk and the full Q&A session. The second part of the Q&A session is a bit on the rough side from a sound perspective but I guess the free beer consumed till then is to blame.
I hope this is useful to some, it was interesting for me to see what I talked about as the whole presentation was finished on the train and completely ad-libbed as it is.
Thanks again to GeekUp and the NorthCast people, good job and I am looking forward to more of this sort.
Hey, the people at Flashforum.de just uploaded the video of my talk at last year’s conference. Click the video to see me trying to struggle through an hour of German public speaking to Flash folk :)
