Today we have enabled the New Accessible Player for all accounts.

Prior to today, these updates had to be enabled via Beta Features in your Account Settings. Now, it’s automatically available to everyone!

Here’s a rundown of the updates which you can read more about here.

Updating our player’s appearance
First, we increased the opacity of the control buttons and eliminated the transparency of the progress bar. These changes might seem subtle, but they will make a big difference in the experience for those with limited or low vision. Plus, our new default player is designed to work well with screen readers and other assistive tools right out of the gate.

Making accessibility part of your brand
Another change we made was increasing the player’s color contrast. Doing so makes the controls easier to identify for people with low vision. But, oftentimes these high-contrast color combinations are jarring — easier to see, but not necessarily pleasing to look at. That’s why we designed our high-contrast color-picker to do both: offer on-brand, visually appealing high-contrast color combinations that both align with WCAG AA 2.1 guidelines and deliver an optimal viewing experience.

Enabling captions and audio descriptions
One important aspect of accessibility is having the ability to add captions and audio descriptions to your videos.

Captions are an easy way to increase accessibility for everyone — from folks with hearing loss to commuters on a loud train and for people whose native language is not the one used in the video. Everyone benefits from the addition of captions to video — having a text version of your video content on your site can give you a much-appreciated SEO boost as well.

When it comes to web accessibility for video, audio descriptions are super important because they describe key visual information that’s not included in the audio track. With these in-app updates, you can now add both audio descriptions and captions to your single video file — without needing to create duplicate video assets.

An in-app checklist to make accessibility part of your workflow
We feel accessibility shouldn’t be an afterthought. That’s why we built an easy-to-use checklist right in the app to make accessibility a seamless part of your workflow. Now, on every video, under “Customize,” you’ll find a comprehensive list of accessibility features to apply, with each one turning green once you’ve completed the action. Aligned with WCAG AA 2.1 guidelines, all of the features* can be enabled right from the checklist, making your accessibility efforts streamlined and visible to everyone on your team. Plus, we’ve included tips and best practices to help your videos reach their highest accessibility potential.