This is one of the demo videos that Kath Moonan of AbilityNet showed during her presentation. It is a user testing interview of a blind user trying to use YouTube with a screen reader and then try the same task with Easy YouTube.

• Watch the video using Easy YouTube
• Watch the video on YouTube

As a lot of the presenters at Scripting Enabled complained about there not being an easy way to go from YouTube to Easy YouTube (forgetting that there is a bookmarklet available in the documentation) I’ve spent 3 minutes to knock up a GreaseMonkey script to install.

It injects a big green link button taking the user to Easy YouTube to play the same video into the page above the video:

You can install the GreaseMonkey Script by activating the following link on a GreaseMonkey enabled Firefox install: Install Easy YouTube for YouTube

I am pondering to also add an off-screen link for screen readers, would that be useful?

Accessibility User Testing goddess Antonia Hyde from United Response just posted the results of user testing the Easy YouTube player with people with learning disabilities on her blog

Her findings so far:

Things people liked

• The control buttons. They were the right size and were easy to understand
• Being able to change the video size
• The volume indicator
• The search facility
• Being able to put the address in the address bar and see the video they wanted, even if they needed help to do it

Things people wanted to be different

• Less information on the player (too many words)
• Things to be organised a bit differently
• The address facility to be at the bottom of the player, not at the top. (The screen was the main concern.)

Things people would like but are not there

• A state change to show that you are about to select a button or a video size
• Visual clues for the different video size options
• Pictures for the search results (Or if not then, for it to be clearer that you can select these options)
• A timecode to tell you how long the video is
• Something to tell you how many videos you will get from the search facility

None of these issues are really hard to put in and I will do so soon.

Check out the post on Antonia’s blog and comment there (or here, I will forward )