Maximum Accessibility: Making Your Web Site More Usable for Everyone

Media Players

The most popular media players—Apple’s QuickTime, RealNetworks’ RealPlayer and RealOne, and Microsoft’s Windows Media Player—are available both as stand-alone desktop applications and as browser plug-ins. These media players address accessibility in different ways and have different strengths and weaknesses; there are even differences between stand-alone and plug-in versions made by the same vendor. So we can’t just tell you to use certain plug-ins and stay away from other ones. Instead, we’ll try to provide some guidelines and principles you can use when you need to decide what’s best for a particular application. In addition to the following discussion, we summarize our comments in Table 14-1.

Of course, a central component of ...