Aside re sounds

http://slow3.w3.org/WAI.old/wcag-curric/sam115-0.htm contains an animation 
of some shaking hands and an icon of a loudspeaker that invokes a sound 
file that speaks "let's shake on it". The behavior of some browsers is 
interesting:

Opera 4.02, after loading the .wav file simply speaks the .wav file and is 
left "in limbo" in that the status bar doesn't show a URI!
IE 5.5 displays a typical sound player which (after loading the file) 
requires the user to press "start" to play the phrase and "close" of the 
player before continuing.
NS 6.3 puts up a box that requires checking in order to load the player 
which starts itself, plays the phrase and then must be closed.

If they all behaved like Opera it would be more "natural".

Of course others' results may vary because I have something different about 
my "native" sound player, which will play layer 3 MP3 .wav files without 
intervention.

Until CSS "aural style sheets" function is widely implemented, our avenues 
for including sonic enhancement are going to be "spotty", but we should 
still work on it because such features are very powerful for both education 
and outreach.

--
Love.
                 ACCESSIBILITY IS RIGHT - NOT PRIVILEGE

Received on Tuesday, 7 November 2000 09:48:45 UTC