Video

[govuk-design-system]

What

Accessible video player for GOV.UK.

Why

More research is required to establish when video is the most appropriate format for government information.

Anything else

• Discussion about video on Dropbox Paper
• Forked version of the Nomensa accessible media player, used by the GOV.UK Frontend toolkit

[joelanman]

Are there any services that use video?

[NickColley]

GOV.UK Publishing does: http://govuk-static.herokuapp.com/component-guide/govspeak/with_youtube_embed

See it in context here: https://www.gov.uk/government/case-studies/out-of-syria-back-into-school

Problems with the current implementation:

1. Captions cannot be used with this custom player (https://docs.google.com/document/d/1YQaBeUltDHZWOLWmwo0i1R3Kx6K_EWEuJO23T7TknLQ/edit#heading=h.xst0yemqxbl3)
2. YouTube embeds track users by sending requests to 'ad words' domain.

There are questions if the basic YouTube player would be better, we have not had time to test this.

We could consider doing something similar to Medium that informs users with 'Do Not Track' enabled, before they consume third-party content.

If successful this pattern could be used for general embedded content.

https://medium.com/policy/how-we-handle-do-not-track-requests-on-medium-f2b4b4fb7c5e

Edit: I did some more work to explore a general purpose pattern for this: https://do-not-track-third-party-embeds.glitch.me/

[amyhupe]

Dropbox Paper audit

On 29 January 2019 the Design System team reviewed a Dropbox Paper document discussing video content.

The aim was to reduce the number of places containing guidance and code by:

• migrating relevant, useful content into the Design System itself
• recording important research findings in the community backlog
• removing the original Dropbox Paper page

Below is a record of the outcomes of that review.

If you need to, you can see the original Dropbox Paper content in the internet archive.

Guidance and examples from Dropbox

The following guidance was shared in the Dropbox Paper files and seemed useful:

1. Do not use video until you have clear user evidence that the topic is easier to understand using moving images.
2. If you decide to use a video, ensure that you have a transcript available for people who cannot view moving images.
3. Try testing the content with the transcript of the video only. If the content works with the transcript alone, consider removing the video.
4. If your video consists of an image of a person talking, consider replacing it with a transcript.

[selfthinker]

As part of accessibility work for GOV.UK I looked into various web video players because the currently used Nomensa video player is very outdated and has a couple of accessibility issues. I tested a few of players for mostly accessibility but also other things like web performance, design options, how well it is maintained, etc. The outcome was that we plan to use the pure YouTube embed video player on GOV.UK while also fixing a couple of issues with it. I cannot point to anything public yet, but we will publish a blog post in due time. I have posted findings to various cross-government communities.

[Sarah-Kingham]

Hi there! Can I ask whether the recommended approach is still to use YouTube? Our eLearning product is using YouTube but we've had some UR feedback that the recommended videos that YouTube display after the individual watches the intended video can be confusing. My understanding is that we can't control this as it is a YouTube setting and based on the person's history so I was wondering whether anyone has experienced similar issues in the past?

[querkmachine]

@Sarah-Kingham Something that might be useful: Assuming you're using the <iframe> embeds, you can add ?rel=0 to the end of the video's URL to make it only recommend videos uploaded by the same YouTube channel.

e.g. https://www.youtube.com/embed/TVYqlikkWX8 → https://www.youtube.com/embed/TVYqlikkWX8?rel=0

[beccagorton-1]

For our service on DFE, which is a training platform for early years providers, we received a lot of feedback from our users in private beta about different formats of learning, including video. Taking some learnings from the NHS we're using Youtube to host (as they have closed captions embedded) and created a design to add a transcript onto the page. The design tested well with users who said they would use the transcript if they didn't want to watch the video, and we have accessibility testing booked in to test this page soon. (Image was for mockup purposes)