> Test-driving the iPlayer
- 2 Aug 07, 05:02 PM
The BBC 7-day catch up service – better known as the iPlayer – has gone into a period of extended beta testing. It allows users to download and watch programmes broadcast on the various BBC television channels from the previous week. Now that the iPlayer has been exposed to a wider audience, we thought it was time to see what people think of it.
I spoke with Paul Porter, a member of the High Tech Team at the RNIB, who is visually impaired and employs a screen reader programme to use the iPlayer, to find out what his early impressions are.
Paul’s overall view is that the iPlayer is quite promising. “I’m moving house at the moment, so it has been great to download and watch programmes that I’ve missed. Installation wasn’t a problem, and I can find and watch shows pretty easily,” he said.
The iPlayer isn’t without its glitches, however. The most serious of these comes with error messages on the programme download page.
If, for example, you try to download a show without logging in first, you get a reminder on the screen to do so. In order for it to work in this way, the error messages are “hidden” in the page. They are not visible to sighted users, but screen readers read out the full list of errors, as if it were a standard part of the content.
This can cause confusion for a user. Nothing might be wrong, yet error messages are read out anyway. And if there really is a problem, because all the error messages are read out, there is no way of knowing which one is applicable. “You get used to it after a while, but then I’m a pretty experienced user. For a novice, it can be confusing,” said Paul.
Gareth Ford Williams, Content Producer for Accessibility in New Media, has confirmed that the iPlayer team are aware of this issue, and are working to resolve it.
It is worth re-iterating that the iPlayer is still in beta testing, and the feedback from users plays a vital part in identifying issues to be resolved in time for the official launch.
On balance, Paul is quite impressed. “I tried out the original version [the IMP] and the iPlayer is a vast improvement on that,” he said.
If you would like to share your experiences with the iPlayer on the Access 2.0 blog, email us and we’ll get in touch, or leave feedback here on any usability or accessibility concerns.
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Considering iPlayer does not even support web-standards-based browsers such as Firefox, your post is very misleading.
Working on a web browser that supports web standards is the first step towards good accessibility. The fact that iPlayer can't even do this - despite the fact that most websites can - just shows what a poor service it is at the moment. Certainly it isn't "promising".
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