Three New Features in Able Player 4.1

Originally published in AccessComputing News, the full version of this article discusses the three new features originally released in Able Player 4.0. However, since then, a newer version of Able Player has been released, with several bug fixes and smaller features.

Able Player is a free, open source HTML media player created with accessibility in mind by me, University of Washington technology accessibility specialist Terrill Thompson, and supported in part by AccessComputing.

Version 4.0 and 4.1 include three important new features:

Able Player now supports Vimeo, though a Plus, Pro, or Business account is required to hide Vimeo’s default controller, and captions are hosted by Vimeo.

There is now full support for audio and video playlists.

Able Player now uses Web Speech API to read text-based audio description, which enables Able Player to resume playback when an audio description is done being read.

To read more in-depth on these new features, see the full article online. Now that Able Player 4.1 is out, our next steps, both actively underway, are to create an Able Player WordPress plugin and an Able Player module for Drupal 8. These tools will make it much easier for content authors to add accessible videos to their web pages, and will increase adoption and enable accessible video to proliferate throughout the web.