2 Responses to “Top 10 search terms to this blog over the last 90 days”

1. 1 damon rose on November 24, 2010 said:

   Hi. I too Googled ‘apple tv bbc iplayer’ today.

   I got one of the new teeny little Apple TV boxes last week and yesterday I accepted the 4.1 update after joyously hearing that it had Voiceover roled into it.

   I’m blind and it’s totally fantastic. It’s the first ever accessible set-top box I’ve had and I spent the entire evening looking through the very limited offerings we Apple TV owners can receive here in the UK (no Netflix, no TV show rentals).

   Set-top box accessibility has been very poor traditionally. This year saw the launch of the first accessible EPG Freeview box via the RNIB, made by Goodmans. Incredible that DTT has taken 12 years to become accessible since ONdigital launched in 1998. Sky recently brought out their ‘sky talker’ but all it does is read you what channel number you’re on plus other limited info: crucially none of the menus (!) We hold out hope they’ll do a firmware upgrade somehow but it’ll take an entire information architecture and API change too I believe.

   The Apple TV spoken interface is simple and amazing. I’ve even used the onscreen keyboard to do YouTUbe searches on it.

   It would, of course, be excellent if BBC iPlayer were able to move onto this platform because, in theory, immediately up to 2 million blind and visually impaired licence fee payers could then acccess BBC on demand video if they bought the relatively inexpensive Apple TV box.

   I guess the fear is that we won’t get the newly fashionable VOD services for another 12 years as with accessible DTT. Ther’es still no accessible PVR access incidentally … not any worth mentioning anyway.

   I work at the BBC too and have seen a demo for the YouView API which includes accessibility via an iPhone. The real shame of this is that few if any STB manufacturers are ever likely to add a speech chip and work on the remote control UI for spoken access using this API. I’d very much like to be proved wrong here. . But Apple are already there as part of their amazing universal access program. The YouView team have some frustrating challenges here but are doing well with access via other devices such as iPhone via wifi. But direct remote control UI is always the ideal situation for accessibility to as many old and young people as possible.

   So back to my point. What likelyhood that BBC iPlayer gets onto the Apple TV platform? Accessibility has to be another good reason as of this week?

   Thanks
   …Damon @damonrose

   Reply

1. 1 iPlayer, Accessibility and Apple TV « jonathan.tweed.name