Audio

Speaking of audio, let's start with audio. Audio is available in a lot of places. There are podcasts, there are audiobooks, stuff like that.

And it's important that that medium is accessible for people who can't hear the audio.

Let's take a quick look at an audio player example. I have prepared this.

So if I go to the front and then press play, this plays.

And these players look different on different websites, so don't get too hung up on how this looks.

There are no requirements for the look apart from the normal design and interaction requirements.

You want to have it keyboard accessible, you want to have enough contrast, stuff like that.

But there's nothing really that is specific to these kinds of players.

And let's hear a little bit on what's going on there.

It's really not that much things happening there.

It's just the intro to this podcast in this case.

And this player has a couple of comfort functionality like the go to the start.

And you can skip through it.

And then you have speed to listen and sound, mute sound and play sound.

Doesn't even have like sound adjustment, which is totally fine.

There is no requirement for accessibility for that.

Some principles, general principles, the user needs to be in control of the audio.

So never auto start the audio, never like spring audio on someone.

There are some interactions where you can use audio.

For example, if someone clicks a button and you have like little feedback sound, that would be OK.

But everything that distracts from the content can be a problem.

So you should never auto start audio and you should make sure that the user is in control and always say like, oh, I don't want this audio to happen right now.

And on websites, you should use the audio element and I get to it why this is so important to use these standard things all the time in a bit.

Because the same goes for video as well.