Skills for Access

Description

Windows Media is a widely-used video format for web-delivered video content, developed by Microsoft. The Windows Media Player currently comes as standard with Windows operating systems, and is also freely available for download for Windows and for Mac OS 8.1 and higher. The latest version (as of March 2005) for Windows is Version 10, and for Mac OS X, Version 9.

Windows Media Player can play several file formats, including .asf, .avi, .midi, .wav, .wma, .wmv and .wm.

Example

Accessibility Issues

Like all video content, Windows Media Player 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 supplementary audio descriptions, additional audio information which can be turned on to play with the video's soundtrack.

Windows Media Player supports provision of synchronised captions using Microsoft's own Synchronised Accessible Multimedia Interchange language (SAMI). However, as of March 2005, Windows Media Player currently does not provide a facility to include additional audio descriptions, making the task of creating Windows Media content accessible to blind and visually impaired people significantly more difficult than it need be.

According to tests run by the WebAIM project, stand-alone versions of Windows Media Player reach a high level of keyboard and screen-reader accessibility; However, the Windows Media Player browser plug-in, which allows multimedia to be embedded within web page content, does present severe accessibility barriers to screen reader users and anyone else unable to use a mouse.