Chris Heilmann, inspired by Antonia Hyde, has been working on an easy to use YouTube Player. Originally conceived as something to cut out the confusion of using YouTube for people with cognitive problems the player is proving a hit all round. It’s trimmed down, easy to use interface is exactly what is needed if you want to get to your video content quickly and with as little hassle and interruption as possible. What I love about it is that it cuts out all the noise that you have when looking at a regular YouTube page and trims down content to the two things you actually want: the player and search.

Key features include:

• Large friendly buttons to click on;
• Clear volume control (although I expected the “Quieter” button to come before the “Louder” button; There is also a large visual display that you can’t miss so you can see what volume you have the player at;
• Good use of colour contrast to make buttons easier to read and understand
  Video resize options of small, medium and large;
• Clear instructions;
• Search integrated into the page.

As well as being visually accessible the player is also screen reader accessible. Given that much of the clutter of the regular YouTube player is removed the user experience is also better as there’s no need to tab around multiple links and wade through additional content. Of course this is a bonus for voice input and keyboard only users as well.

There are a couple of little fixes that need to be made (the help documentation isn’t there for example) and it does rely on JavaScript (difficult to see how it couldn’t to be fair) but over all it’s a great application and a perfect example of how we should be making.

Check out the Easy YouTube player player and see what you think.

Update

The player help documentation is now available and I have to say a real bonus in itself. One very non technical thing that people constantly forget is to write really good, clear, help documentation to accompany their web apps or sites. Too often I’ve seen apps or sites that let themselves down because they don’t support people using them or flag accessibility features.