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 )

<farnsworth>Good news everyone!</farnsworth>: Adobe today announced the new searchability features of Flash complete with a specifications document of the SWF format.

This means that as hackers we can now access SWFs on a very low level to extract data that might not be available to end users (those who have no flash, or cannot navigate it).

Piggy-backing on this Google announced that they are indexing SWF and according to Adobe Yahoo! are soon to follow.

This is good news and bad news. For some years people have been using Google to read PDF documents (as Google indexed them and offered an HTML version and because it is terribly hard to create accessible PDFs or, as Heni put it, that PDFs suck!. Now Google can be used as a cheap way around the Flash issue, too.

Both means though that companies are more likely even less inclined to spend extra effort to make data available independent of plug-ins. The old “if it doesn’t work in a screen reader, it’ll be impossible to find by search engines” argument is out of the window now. Shame, it worked well (although we shouldn’t have to force people to consider accessibility).

The other really terrible news about this is that Flash generated by JavaScript will not be indexed at all:

“Googlebot does not execute some types of JavaScript. So if your web page loads a Flash file via JavaScript, Google may not be aware of that Flash file, in which case it will not be indexed.”

This is really bad as using SWFObject to include your Flash in web sites is the only sensible way - you test for support before you apply and you enhance progressively. There has to be a way around this problem. Just making it indexable by search engines should not stop people from assuming users have the right flash version.