Abstract:

The Web is an internet service that has revolutionized the way we perform our daily activities. Nowadays, as a consequence of the technological advance, the incorporation of multimedia resources on the Web is extremely high. In the educational field, the use of multimedia content in recent years has significantly increased in e-Learning because of the rise of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC). However, not all video players provide the features for people with disabilities to access the information of the videos. The lack of accessibility in multimedia players has opened a gap that excludes an important group of people worldwide from exercising their right to education. Not all people with disabilities encounter barriers on the Web, and those with different types of disabilities encounter different types of barriers. For example, some of the accessibility problems faced in media players by people who are deaf or hard of hearing are the lack of options to activate or deactivate the captions or the selection of the captions language that the user understands, among others; visually impaired people must overcome problems in the absence of audio description and the respective option to activate or deactivate it; and the lack of labels on the buttons that specify the functions of each of them and the possibility of selecting all options with both the mouse and keyboard is a problem that affects all people, whether with or without disabilities. Because the importance of this topic, some researchers have conducted previous analysis of the accessibility of video players, but as far as we know, a fully accessible video player is not available yet. The inaccessibility of video players means that people with or without disabilities and older adults cannot access to multimedia content. This problem in an e-Learning process can be one of the causes for people to make the decision to drop out a course. This article presents a detailed analysis of the components and accessibility features that video players should comply based on the User Agent Accessibility Guidelines (UAAG) 2.0 of the World Wide Web Consortium. Finally, based on this proposal, the results of the compliance evaluation with the accessibility requirements of six of the most popular video players (Elmedia, Media Player Classic, UMPlayer, Vimeo, VLC Media Player, Youtube) are presented.

Keywords:

Accessibility, e-learning, multimedia, user agent accessibility guidelines (UAAG) 2.0, video player.