Re: Media: Question about autoplay (video in browsers)

On Jan 27, 2011, at 6:12 PM, David Singer wrote:

> 
> On Jan 28, 2011, at 11:02 , Silvia Pfeiffer wrote:
>> 
>> 
>>> Kenny Johar had an interesting idea when we talked about this issue last week on the task force telcon: have each UA provide a "pause all media elements" API for assistive technology products so the user can pause playback by touching a key. I like this idea because it puts control in the hands of the user, the only one that actually knows when they don't want to hear something play.
>> 
>> 
>> That is a very interesting idea and I think it would be very useful to
>> everybody. When my browser crashes and I reload it with all the tabs
>> that were open beforehand, I sometimes have videos start playback in
>> tabs that I didn't even remember I had open. It would be very good to
>> have a button: "pause all media elements on any tab", which then
>> avoids me having to go look through all the tabs to find the one that
>> is causing the autoplay trouble. That's really a great idea IMO.
> 
> 
> This is promising, but I am puzzled.  If a page has a video that the site has set auto-play, no default controller, and no custom controls, and then the UA does a 'pause all', how does that UA now enable the user to re-enable play?
> 
  Maybe another UA function assistive technology products can use to "resume all media elements"?

> Slight variation:  'UAs may have a setting "standard play is disabled" which means that auto-play, play(), the built-in controller, none of them can play the content.  Instead, the UA must offer some affordance to control play/pause.'
> 
  Why would we disable the default controls, which require user interaction? Wouldn't "some affordance to control play/pause" include the default controls?


> This is not ideal, especially for audio-only elements, where it's not obvious what affordance would work, and it is probably not obvious to the user that something *might* have played (and hence they should look for the affordance).
> 
  I don't think this works at all for a page with lots elements, or with <audio> and <video> elements are are not in the DOM. For example, what sort of UI would you expect for a page with 50 hidden audio elements? Or how is a user that can't see the page supposed to quickly find the noisy element in a page one <audio> element but lots of other elements?

eric