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

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?

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.'

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).


David Singer
Multimedia and Software Standards, Apple Inc.

Received on Friday, 28 January 2011 02:15:45 UTC