Hot tip of the Day: YouTube keyboard controls!

Hot tip of the day, which RantWoman promised to share with people interested in the United Blind of Seattle / STAR of Seattle Blind Geeks Meetup, except that only one geek showed up, we had a great conversation, and RantWoman will now share this tip separately by email and social media.

YouTube now has keyboard controls! Presumably they are discoverable by many users but RantWoman tends to stumble along doing things the ways she knows and does not always go look for new stuff. Here are the controls; as always things are subject to change but RantWoman is excited enough to document and share.

Here in the words of Ana G, RantWoman's hot source:
I was Googling something else and discovered that YouTube has some nifty keyboard shortcuts. I'm posting them in case others of you didn't know them either.

To play/pause a video, hit the spacebar.

To fast forward or rewind by 5 seconds, tap the right- or left-arrow key.

To fast forward or rewind by 10 seconds, tap the letter l or j.

To fast forward or rewind longer, hold down the right- or left-arrow key.

To jump to the 10, 20, 30 ... percent point in the video, hit the 1, 2, 3 ... on the keyboard.

I just tried the shortcuts, and they do work. You have to give the videoa couple of seconds to start playing. I don't know if focus is moving  to the seek control during that time. The screen reader does chatter, but you can tap the control key to shut it up.

Just passing it along.



The tip above came to RantWoman's email via blogger and accessibility advocate Ana G. Here is something from Tek Talk dated 2012 but it has references and contact info.

http://accessibleworld.org/content/accessible-world-tek-talk-presents-ana-g-android-operating-system-accessible-0