5.0.0 June 21, 2026

Features

• Can be installed and bundled as an NPM package with a new ES module entry point ableplayer.esm.js. Tested with Vue and Vite, should also be compatible with other stacks with webpack, React, etc.
• No longer exposes anything on window, except the UMD bundles when used as an IIFE, which only add AblePlayer. UMD bundles tested to work properly with RequireJS.
• Code cleaned up to run in "strict" mode, which is required for ES modules.
• Can be dynamically created and disposed indefinitely without memory leaks or event handling issues. Use new AblePlayer(media) and instance.dispose().
• TypeScript type definitions for ableplayer.esm.js.
• Source maps for all bundles.
• Support for Spoken Captions. New options in Captions settings menu to enable automatic voicing of captions.

Design

• Default CSS now limits the max width of the video element loading Able Player to 100%.
• Added new class .ableplayer-clear, used only in legacy display options.
• Separator between elapsed time and total duration is now a separate span class="able-timer-separator".

Non-breaking changes

• Audited translation files and removed 38 translatable strings that were unused or duplicated by other strings.
• Removed all inline scripts and styles from Able Player core.
• Removed unused parameters from the AccessibleSlider component.

Breaking changes

• data-root-path no longer supported (or needed, in most cases). Translations are now bundled, and icons are always hard-coded SVGs. For most users this is an improvement, since translations and icons no longer need to be hosted separately, and translations are no longer fetched in a loop. Once you migrate, you can delete button-icons and translations from your application. However, to add custom translations, you will need to build your own bundle, and custom icons are no longer possible.
  • Relatedly, data-icon-type no longer supported, since the icons are now always hard-coded SVGs.
  • There are plans for a future release to allow configuration in new AblePlayer to add custom translations and icons.
• Various things Able Player added to window are moved or no longer exposed.
  • window.AblePlayerInstances -> AblePlayer.ablePlayerInstances. Previously, dynamically creating an Able Player required applications to manually add the new instance to window.AblePlayerInstances. Code doing this will no longer work. To migrate, just call new AblePlayer and it will automatically add itself to AblePlayer.ablePlayerInstances. Don't forget to call dispose() to dynamically remove instances from this list. This list is now a Set rather than an array, but most applications won't need to access it directly anymore.
  • UMD bundles that include DOMPurify no longer expose it on window. If you need DOMPurify on window, migrate to the separate-dompurify bundle, and include DOMPurify in a separate <script> tag.
  • Able Player internals are no longer exposed on window.
    • window.AccessibleDialog
    • window.AccessibleSlider
    • window.validate
• Able Player is now built expecting browsers to support ES 2022. 95% of browsers support ES 2022, compared to 96% for ES 2015. Use Babel or similar to transpile to older ES versions, if you're sure you need one. Able Player 4.8.0 was already using Object.hasOwn which is part of ES 2022, but those will now be more widespread, so new breakage is possible.

Bug fixes

• Region-specific language tags are supposed to have the region capitalized. The affected translations are pt-BR and zh-TW. Able Player was lowercasing them before.
• Various issues with Vimeo error handling. The catch blocks were referencing nonexistent variables.
• Fix prev/next item navigation in playlists.
• Display volume value as a percentage in all cases.
• Update seekbar width to be expressed in percentages.
• Fix handling of data-lang attribute so language is detected more consistently.

Code cleanup

• Able Player now passes eslint's "recommended" rule set. In the process, we fixed some values that were always undefined before, for example: this.lang, and the lang values in getSampleDescriptionText. This shouldn't break anything, but, worth mentioning just in case someone was relying on these values being undefined.

Documentation

• Added documentation about Able Player's Content Security Policy requirements.

Internationalization

• Added Slovak translation (props @rraddatch - Radoslav Ďurač)
• Updated Catalan translation (props @ralcarazm)
• Updated Dutch translation (props @rianrietveld)

Full Changelog: v4.8.0...v5.0.0