In the last couple of weeks, while listening to my favourite Italian music, I noticed that the number of controls available on YouTube video players has increased – I counted between 5 and 9 different controls on each video player. Thanks to these controls users can change the way the movie is displayed to meet their preferences and needs. The option to show captions is also provided (if captions are available), and some videos even allow users to modify the size of caption text and remove or add a black background. This is a great functionality to offer and I am happy to see that YouTube is trying to improve the accessibility of its videos.

However, I believe that most of the new controls are not very usable because the icons are ineffective at communicating their purpose and hard to distinguish. On the video below a triangle is displayed on 5 of the 8 controls. A slightly different size, orientation or background colour is not really enough to distinguish their respective functions. For example, the ‘Play Video’ button looks almost identical to the ‘Display Advertising’ control, although they offer very different functionalities. Also, it is impossible to predict the purpose of many of these controls just by looking at them – how could I guess that an upward triangle allows me to select closed captions and annotations?

The ‘Full Windows’ and ‘Full Screen’ controls present similar issues – they are difficult to distinguish and their functionality is hard to predict.

I believe that the usability of the YouTube video player could be greatly improved by replacing the icons currently used with more intuitive icons, like the ones displayed on the ABC website (see figure below).

Also, text which appears during mouse over could be used to provide information on the functionality of each control (see the example below from the dotSUB website).

Surely, after utilising the YouTube video player a few times users will understand the purpose of each control and are likely to become familiar with them. However, watching videos is the key action on YouTube, so it should be a very easy task for all users, even first time and less experienced visitors.