Skills for Access

Multimedia Help

Multimedia Players

To view the multimedia content of this site, you will need an appropriate media player. You can download for free the latest version of the main media players from the following sites:

• RealPlayer Download
• QuickTime Download
• Windows Media Player Download
• Flash Player Download
• Shockwave Player Download

An extensive listing of previous versions of the above players - some of them downloadable - is provided at OldVersion.com

Enabling Accessibility Features of Players

Windows Media Player

Windows Media Player 9 or 10: open the 'Play' menu, choose 'Captions and Subtitles', and select 'On if Available'. If this does not display captions, try opening the 'Tools' menu, selecting 'Options', then the 'Security' tab, and select the 'Show local captions when present' check box. The keyboard shortcut CTRL+Shift+C also toggles captions on or off.

Windows Media Player 8: Open the View menu, choose 'Now Playing Tools' and then select 'Captions'. Unfortunately, as at March 2005, no version of Windows Media Player has a feature to turn on or off audio descriptions provided as a separate audio track.

QuickTime

If provided, captions should automatically be displayed when an embedded or standalone QuickTime movie is launched (with the free QuickTime Player, you will be unable to turn them off - only QuickTime Pro Player has the ability to turn captions off or on).

To toggle on or off captions or soundtracks in QuickTime Pro version 6, in the 'Edit' menu select 'Enable tracks'. This gives you a list of tracks, including the text track(s) containing captions. Deselect a track to turn it off. Note that there may be many tracks to deselect, particularly if the movie has several audio description files added to it.

RealPlayer

If present, captions should normally display automatically when played in RealPlayer. However, to, make sure captions appear when available, in RealPlayer 10, select 'Tools' (or 'View' in older versions of RealPlayer), then 'Preferences', then 'Content'. In the 'Accessibility' section of the control panel that appears, then select the checkbox 'Use supplemental text captioning when available.'

To turn audio descriptions on or off in RealPlayer 10 or RealOne, follow the same instructions as for captions, and in the 'Content' control panel, select or deselect ''Use descriptive audio when available'.

Problems Playing Multimedia?

We have developed a way of providing our multimedia content in what we believe to be a standards-compliant, cross-browser compatible way, but at the same time, we know that there may be some issues that people using certain browsing set-ups may face. Known issues include:

Safari

Check your General settings in Safari. Make sure the "Open 'safe' files after downloading" option is checked, this will then allow Safari to open the standalone media players to play the media content.

If you still have a problem accessing our content, please get in touch with details of your problem, including your browser and operating system, and we'll do our best to help you.