Skills for Access

Description

QuickTime is a widely used video format for web-delivered video content, developed by Apple. QuickTime files have the extension .mov (or sometimes .moov for Macs). To access web-based QuickTime movie content, a user can view the content embedded in a web page using the QuickTime plug-in for their web browser, or in a stand-alone QuickTime Player. Players are available for Mac and Windows PC users, but currently not for Unix/Linux platforms. The QuickTime Player comes in two versions - a free, limited- functionality Player, and QuickTime Pro which costs $29.99 (around £25 as at February 2005).

QuickTime is available for Windows and Mac operating systems, and allows the playback of various file formats including QT, QuickTime VR, and MPEG-4.

Example

Accessibility Issues

Like all video content, QuickTime content by its nature will present problems to people who have difficulty seeing, or can't see, the video. If sound is provided, people who are deaf or hard of hearing will also encounter access barriers. These access problems can be overcome by provision of captions to provide a text alternative to audio content, and through provision of supplementary audio descriptions to provide an alternative to key visual content.

A drawback is that the facility to turn on and off captions and audio descriptions is only provided for QuickTime Pro, as in QuickTime Player the captions are open captions (that is, if available, captions are always visible on the screen). The same is true for audio descriptions, meaning that separate versions of the QuickTime video may be required if you wish to offer a version without captions and audio description.

There is also an issue with the accessibility of the QuickTime interface itself. Research by the WebAIM project found that neither the QuickTime browser plug-in allowing multimedia to be embedded within web page content nor the stand-alone versions of QuickTime are fully accessible to screen reader users or to users who rely on the keyboard only.