Audio start in accessible courses

Jul 02, 2021

Hello all,
I need to redesign a non-accessible training into an accessible training. The new target audience is "everyone", so non-disabled people, but also disabled people.
The audio tracks should not start immediately at page start, because then the automatically starting screen reader (for blind people) would run at the same time as the audio, which is very irritating. So I set the trigger "Play Audio when the user presses Ctrl+Alt+P after clicking on this slide". However, now it's like non-disabled people have to press this key combination as well. It doesn't work if they press the triangular play button to the left of the seekbar with the mouse.

Does anyone have any ideas on how I can make the audio start appealing to all people, whether they use a mouse or the keyboard controls?

Best regards,
Laura

3 Replies

Leslie McKerchie
Staff

almost 3 years ago07/06/21 at 4:56 pm (UTC)

Hi Laura,

Thanks for reaching out and sharing what you would like to create with your project.

Good call on not having audio auto-play so that you can have a great experience for all learners.

I'm curious how do the learners know that there is audio to play? Would it make more sense to have a button for your sighted/mouse learners, or would you prefer to use the play button on the seekbar?

You could add a button with a trigger to play the audio as well.
If you'd prefer to use the seekbar, you could have the audio set to autoplay on the slide, but pause the slide's timeline when the slide timeline starts, then the play button will work as expected to play the timeline of the slide and the audio.

I look forward to hearing how others have accomplished similar goals.

Phil Mayor
Hero

almost 3 years ago07/06/21 at 5:18 pm (UTC)

I would add a the player mute/unmute audio control

Laura Troßmann
Author

over 2 years ago07/29/21 at 12:43 pm (UTC)

Hello Leslie and Phil,

thanks for the responses! They have helped me to think in the right direction.

You wanted to know how learners know that an audio is available to play: At the beginning of the course, the user is told to start each page at individual pace and to manually play the audio. Sighted learners play the audio using the triangular player button.

In the meantime, I tried a lot of things and settled on the solution that people using the keyboard press a combination of keys. To page start I set the trigger that the timeline should stop first when the page starts. The page will not continue until the user presses play or the key combination.

Please find a screenshot attached of my trigger settings.

Best regards
Laura

Trigger.jpg