AccessTube
Free. For Windows 10 and 11. Works for blind and sighted users alike.
AccessTube downloads videos and audio from YouTube and hundreds of other sites — through an interface your screen reader actually reads. Popular downloader front-ends are built on toolkits that are silent to NVDA on Windows; AccessTube uses native Windows controls, so every box and button speaks, tabs, and behaves the way you expect.
Download AccessTube (zip, about 15 MB)
Features
- Paste one URL or a whole list — one per line.
- Pick a quality preset: best quality, 1080p, 720p, or audio-only MP3 / M4A.
- Playlist protection: a playlist link grabs only the single video unless you explicitly say otherwise.
- Progress spoken sensibly — the status bar tracks the percentage, the log keeps just the milestones instead of hundreds of update lines.
- Remembers your folder and format choices between runs.
- No install wizard and no need for Python or anything else: on first run it offers to fetch its download engine for you, one keystroke, done.
Installing and first run
- Extract the zip anywhere you like — your Documents folder, a Programs folder, anywhere. Inside is an AccessTube folder; open it and run AccessTube.exe. That's the whole install.
- Windows SmartScreen may warn about a new program from an unknown publisher the first time. Choose "More info", then "Run anyway". The download contains exactly what we built, nothing else — and you can prove that with the fingerprint below.
- On first launch AccessTube offers to download its engine (yt-dlp) — say yes and you are ready.
- For combining best-quality video and audio, it can also install ffmpeg for you through Windows' built-in package manager, via the "Install / update components" button (Alt+I).
Keyboard quick reference
- Tab and Shift+Tab move between controls.
- Alt+U: URL box. Alt+F: format choice. Alt+O: download folder. Alt+B: browse.
- Alt+D: start download. Alt+C: cancel. Alt+E: toggle whole-playlist downloads.
- Alt+I: install or update components. Alt+P: progress log.
Verify your download (optional)
The SHA-256 fingerprint of AccessTube.zip is:
09DDC0967F1ACF63E60991D7BAF8CFBBD164394675C23D9C85C1A6287B5E0010
To check it, open a command prompt in your Downloads folder and run:
certutil -hashfile AccessTube.zip SHA256
— if the string Windows prints matches the one above, your copy is byte-for-byte exactly what we published.