A new version of WP YouTube Lyte was released over the weekend. Benetech, a U.S. nonprofit that develops and uses technology to create positive social change, offered a patch that adds the accessibilityFeature property to videos that have captions. If you have microdata enabled, WP YouTube Lyte now will automatically check if captions are available and if so, adds the accessibilityFeature property with value “captions” to the HTML-embedded microdata.
As YouTube only offers information on captions in their API v3, which requires authentication, the check is done in a separate, asynchronous call via a proxy-webservice on api.a11ymetadata.org. You can see an example of what the response looks like here and look at the source code on Github. This webservice-request for captions can be disabled by simply switching off microdata. Alternatively, if you want microdata but not the accessibilityFeature-property, you can use the “lyte_docaptions”-filter to set captions to false (you can find an example in lyte_helper.php_example).
This was the first time someone actively submitted code changes to add functionality to a project of mine, actually. Working with Benetech was a breeze and GitHub is a great platform to share, review and comment code. I for one am looking forward to more high-quality contributions like this one!