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Re: Video and auto play

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From: Mark Magennis
Date: Feb 9, 2022 3:02AM

I think you have to consider the context too. For example, suppose you have a list of courses where activating a course goes to a page with the course player. As someone else has said, a user may need time to do a few things before choosing to start playing the course, such as read the introduction, look at the table of contents, turn on captions or audio description, adjust playback speed, etc. A screen reader user will need to be able to use their screen reader to do this without the content audio competing with the screen reader output. So autoplay would not be good. But then consider when the user has gone some way through the course and is resuming at a later date. They may do this frequently, taking the course one lesson at a time. In this case selecting the course means "start again where I left off". It can be seen as equivalent to pressing Play, so autoplay may be appropriate. As long as focus is placed on a Pause button then they can easily stop it playing if they want to do something else before resuming.

One thing you have to watch out for though is automatic screen reader announcements. If going to the course involves a new HTML page load then the screen reader will read title, number of headings and links etc. If it is a virtual page load then you may have scripted a live region for the screen reader to announce the course title. If you move focus to the Pause button, the screen reader may announce the button, something like "button Pause press space to activate" (JAWS no longer does this since 2021 which is a major PITA). If the audio starts immediately then these announcements may be competing with it. So if you're using autoplay you want to not cause these announcements or either leave a short gap for them to happen before playback starts.

Mark