Autoplay Scripting

Talking about autoplay, this is a functionality that you should generally avoid.

I have never come across a website that I deemed accessible that autoplayed video.

So just don't use it, especially like these big background videos.

They can be very hard for people with certain cognitive disabilities.

to ignore and they distract from the content. It's just not a good way to do it.

The nice thing about HTML video elements is that most browsers now give you the option to

completely disable autoplaying videos. So this is a screenshot of a very old version of Safari.

And basically you can say autoplay, stop all, never autoplay.

Or you can say I only want silent videos to autoplay.

So you can make that decision on a general global basis and on a website by website basis.

Both elements, audio and video, are completely scriptable.

That means if you want to use your own UI, you can actually do that.

And you can use, you know, normal HTML buttons and UI elements and users can click on that.

And this is the preferred way to do this.

And so if you're testing stuff for audio and video and audio or video element is used, which should be like 99% of all cases these days, then, you know, you just need to look at like, oh, does this pause button, is that available using the tab key?

Is that reacting to keyboard access and stuff like that?

So you don't need to do anything extra because these elements have that capability, which is super nice.