This website is designed to provide an accessible version of the popular video-sharing website YouTube. In addition to traditional accessible design practices such as semantic, well-structured markup, high-contrast colour schemes and standards compliance, newly-available technologies such as WAI-ARIA have been implemented to allow users of assistive technologies to benefit from rich functionality such as dynamic page updates.
Unlike the regular YouTube site, videos here don't auto-play. You can start them by hitting the Play button or, alternatively, by using a keyboard shortcut. The combination Alt+Z will play a loaded video (or pause one currently playing), while Alt+X will skip 15 seconds backward and Alt+C will skip 15 seconds forward. To begin viewing videos, use the search form at the top of the page.
It should be noted that this website has been built as a technical exercise, so certain functionality may operate differently from how you might expect. Similarly, screen reader users using an application which doesn't support WAI-ARIA live regions may have some trouble using dynamically-updated parts of the site.
If you do not have Adobe Flash player installed, or if you have JavaScript disabled in your browser, this site will not work properly!
I'm currently running a questionnaire to gather information about what you think of this service. There are a total of 22 questions, all of which are very short, and the whole thing shouldn't take more than five or ten minutes to complete. If you can find time to fill it in, I'd be very appreciative.