RE: Audio control accessibility mechanisms

Are you suggesting that pressing the spacebar should mute the audio regardless of which element has focus? If so, I would say that is not an acceptable or expected behaviour. The spacebar usually scrolls the page down unless a button has focus, in which case it operates the button.

Steve Green
Managing Director
Test Partners Ltd


From: Eric Chima <emchima@gmail.com>
Sent: 11 November 2019 22:14
To: w3c-wai-ig@w3.org
Subject: Audio control accessibility mechanisms

Hi all, apologies if something like this has been discussed, but I couldn't find it in a search of the archive.

My organization has a large number of auto-playing videos on its pages, and no easy mechanism to mute them. This seems to violate the audio control rule (1.4.2), so I've been looking for the best mechanism to rectify that.

The ideal solution would be to play videos muted until the user unmutes them, but I'm not sure that will fly. The suggested technique on the WCAG page is to have a control near the beginning of the page that mutes all audio (which is an avenue I could pursue), but the other option I was considering is to just have the space bar pause the video, the same way YouTube does. This wouldn't be spelled out on the page, so I guess the question is whether the "space bar pause" has entered the web interaction lexicon enough that users just know to do it. If that's the case, then maybe the space bar pause is easier than tabbing through the page to find a "mute all" button while a video is playing.

Is the space bar pause a satisfactory resolution to this problem? Am I missing an obvious problem with it? Or is there a better option that people are already using that I just don't know about?

Thanks,
Eric