What good is the power of video learning if everyone can’t take advantage of it?
State and federal laws mandate accessibility, but it’s a best practice to go beyond that with online video. Many of the latest Mediasite features focus on improving accessibility, our top priority.
We’ve taken the initiative to enhance accessibility within our entire product, and now it’s even easier for a screen reader to access and read content.
Other feature releases come thanks to user feedback. You’ll see those changes in the management portal and Mediasite Desktop Recorder, which gives you an even more functional experience.
Mobile Friendly Management Portal
The Mediasite community wanted an optimized mobile experience within the management portal for Mediasite admins. So we’ve enhanced it for better viewing and operating on a mobile device. The drag and drop function is now disabled when you are viewing the portal on a mobile device which alleviates some of the difficulty of viewing the portal away from a desktop computer. And with the world going more mobile every day, it’s a concept we’ll continue to explore.
Enhanced Mediasite Desktop Recorder Functionality
Two new features improve the Mediasite Desktop Recorder (MDR), the easy-to-use personal capture software offered as part of My Mediasite. You now have the ability to move the setup window on the screen, making the task of selecting a recording area much easier and giving you a good preview of what you’re going to be recording. A second update with MDR is the capture area window is more dynamic and responsive to different screen resolutions.
While these changes won’t likely change your workflow, they do improve the usability and functionality of the platform.
Curate, Watch and Interact with Videos in Mediasite Channels
My Mediasite is rapidly becoming a content hub for all instructors, professors and content creators. With channels becoming the standard for content collection, navigation between channels and My Mediasite has been improved with the addition of a direct link.
When a user is logged in (and has My Mediasite permission), they’ll see a dropdown menu allowing them to change settings, share the channel and navigate back to My Mediasite. This means a content creator can easily navigate between content in the channel and presentations that are in My Mediasite. Even though a channel is created in the management portal, presentations within the channel can be edited through My Mediasite. The direct link is a simpler way to navigate.
More Accessible Videos
One of the features that will improve Mediasite accessibility is the new default color schemes in the My Mediasite theme. The palette is darkened to improve the color contrast within My Mediasite. The blues are darker, and the lighter colors used for thumbnails and text throughout My Mediasite are darkened.
My Mediasite is now an AAA contrast ratio, the highest ranking for Web Content Accessibility Guidelines.
There are now two different themes available in My Mediasite. The legacy theme will feature lighter colors and lower contrast. The new Mediasite theme will feature the high contrast color changes. Users can switch between the two themes with the click of a button. In the management portal, you can manage the themes globally for your organization or turn on or off the ability for an individual user to change themes.
New Caption Editor
Our caption editor, initially released as beta in December, now has significantly increased functionality. This highly requested feature allows you to view and edit existing video captions including the ability to change the text and timing of those captions. Navigation is now streamlined using either the play bar on the video preview or the caption list in the left-hand column. The preview player is now seek-able, where in the past the video would just play through. We’ve also added keyboard shortcuts, making the editing process more efficient.
Download Captions
Another new feature is the ability to download a caption file to improve the accessibility of videos. There are three ways to download the caption files: through the management portal on the presentation summary page, in My Mediasite on the video details page and within a channel using the ‘download to computer’ link.
There were more than 50 updates in the latest release of Mediasite. You can learn more about all of them in this webinar.
