Skills for Access

Description

RealMedia is a widely used video format for web-delivered video content, developed by Real Networks. RealMedia files have the extension .rm.

To access web-based RealMedia movie content, a user must either have a RealPlayer plug-in for their web browser or a stand-alone RealPlayer. Players are available for Windows PC users, Unix/Linux platforms and Mac OS X. RealPlayer has undergone a number of version changes, with the latest version of RealPlayer at the time of writing (February 2005) being Version 10. There is a free, limited functionality RealPlayer, and an advanced version, RealPlayer Plus, which costs around £30. In addition to RealMedia content, RealPlayer can also play Flash movies.

Example

Accessibility Issues

Like all video content, RealMedia 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. RealPlayer supports authoring of captions and audio descriptions using the open technology Synchronised Multimedia Integration Language (SMIL).

According to tests run by the WebAIM project, stand-alone versions of RealPlayer reach a high level of keyboard and screen reader accessibility. However, the RealPlayer 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.