Some serious accessibility issues

[Sergiaws]

As a blind user and as a lover of retro style user interface, I noticed that this new yt2009 frontend has serious accessibility issues. Firstly, the buttons to manage the player don't have a visible label and aren't detected as buttons anyway. So, a screen reader won't understand that the element is a button. It's even a generic span, so it doesn't has semantic as it happen with button element or element with attribute role="button". Another bad thing is that there's not a kind of easy way of skipping through videos with a screen reader. As a way to fix that, I would suggest that the link with the title of the video would have an h2 inside it, or a span with role"heading" and aria-level="2". Doing this browsing is faster.
As a quick way I decided to create an userscript which makes these changes. My userscript adds in the link a span with role="heading" and aria-level="2". Instead of this span, putting a normal h2 would be much better, however I'm not sure if putting h2 will break the layout, so you need to see that and consider if you can do it, or maybe apply custom css rules to the h2.
As a quick fix for the buttons, I decided to enable the native html5 player adding the controls attribute to the video tag. Fixing the buttons is still preferred, cause that would open possibilities for non html5 browsers. You can fix that with aria using role="button" and aria-label, or you can use the best option (replace div/span/whatever with native button elements and put some text inside the button). Here's the code of the userscript. Feel free to commit or make pull request to my repository.
https://github.com/Sergiaws/YT2009-Accessibility-Fixer

[ftde0]

i see what you're going for, but i'm not sure if i can make the described changes globally (such as native/properly used tag names) out to everyone as youtube itself was just as inaccessible back in the day and those changes could interfere with the original css and html that's used by yt2009.

http://web.archive.org/web/20090927150841/http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jNQXAC9IVRw

i'll keep this open as i agree this is something to be considered now that we're not in 2009 anymore.

[Sergiaws]

Maybe Youtube 2009 didn't had such changes. But I'm sure that YouTube around 2012 had that, or at least I remember using youTube in late 2012, 2013, 2014 and 2015. I am prety sure that it countained h2 tags as I suggested. I remember playing videos at these times. I used windows XP, JAWS screen reader (version 11) and IE (maybe version 8). We might also inspect 2012 result page. As I told, since you are not using h2 tags, you can also consider removing the styles of that tag so it behaves like a div or span. Css stuff excluding properties like display: none or visibility: hidden don't affect screen readers.