YouTube just announced a new feature that you can deep-ink to a certain time of the video by adding a time stamp to the URL. I was working on this for EasyYoutube, too, now I am just waiting till the API supports it natively, too (you can already jump to a time but the URI splicing and detection would be cool).

To jump directly to a certain time in a video, just add the time stamp with a URI hash

http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=qie-N8idatc#t=1m54s

They are also detecting timestamps in comments and link them directly. There is a slight problem that YouTube automatically redirects you from www.youtube.com to yourcountry.youtube.com (for example uk), and that breaks these links! I’ll pester my contacts to look into that.

Well done YouTube!

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?

Great news everyone! Google just announced support for closed captioning in YouTube videos:

• YouTube Blog Post
• Detailed information on YouTube support

Congratulations, and thank you, YouTube, we’ve come one step closer to using online video for more good than looking and falling monkeys.