WebAIM - Web Accessibility In Mind

E-mail List Archives

Re: Background music autoplaying?

for

From: Jonathan H
Date: Apr 29, 2017 5:08AM

On 29 April 2017 at 10:34, Patrick H. Lauke < <EMAIL REMOVED> > wrote:

> But in general, if you can avoid having autoplaying audio/music in the first
> place, that'd be best.

Well, that's what I thought.

This post came from a conversation where a screenreader user said that
if I as I was contacting this organisation anyway, could I mention
that their autoplay makes it difficult for screenreader users, as he
had tried to contact them and go no reply. So I tried it myself, found
the same, mentioned it as part of my email, and got pretty short
shrift in reply!

The person I was speaking to who brought this to my attention uses IE
and Jaws on Windows 7. There is a recording below I just made on my
own Windows 10 PC - the first 15 seconds is what I hear with
Chromevox, the remainder of the minute is with Firefox and NVDA.

https://goo.gl/4KrvT1

The reason I posted here was in case me and screenreader user were
doing something wrong.

Looking at the page code, it looks like it is a microsoft embedded
plugin so it might be Mac users that don't get autoplay - all the
controls, visibility and so on are hidden, and the audio is set to
autoplay in the background on page load, so I cannot see any way that
a user could stop the playback.

Thanks.