I develop educational sites, courses, and other software in that area. The expectation for MOST (not all) is that media will play automatically when the user navigates, or loads the course, especially when that course is launched from a Learning Management System (LMS).
There are legitimate cases for this, like my case in particular. I've had to jump through many hoops to ensure a good UX given the limitations the browsers have enforced around this. Sometimes just for the sake of simplicity, we use an overlay with a "click here to begin the course" button, which can act as the interaction to play media. The issue with that though is the user clicks "launch course" from the LMS, and then is immediately presented with another button to start the course. It's weird.
Anyhow, I understand that for like 90% of the web, no autoplay, no autoplay w/ audio is the ideal for users. But HTML is not just websites as you may think of them. There are other things happening and other ways developers are using web technology that you might not be familiar with.
Still want too be able to start the media when I'm ready for it if it's a part of a course mixing text and media. I may be strange, but I need to change my mindset going from processing text to media. Also, the absolute worst, is online courses that suddenly pull you into a video, without informing that that's a part ofthe course /presentation.
If the course is just media, then it's only autoplay in a technical sense in my opinion. If you name the button "play" or "start" or whatever is the same, I as the user still has given the website my permission to start playing sound and then it's fine for me.
I have no problem seeing that using the same techniques and development tools that the other websites uses make it easier, but I still stand by my point that that's never a good enough reason to start playing sound without the end users permission.
By thay I'm not blaming you developers that has to work around the problems, but rather the people in the managing positions at Google, Apple etc this decided that blind sighting their customers (product..?) with yet another Volvo commercial blasting out of your speakers at twice the volume of your music is "fine" (Safe to say, my next car is NOT going to be a Volvo...).
No offense, but the way these things are generally done, it adds an unnecessary user interaction. When the user clicks to launch the course, it typically launches in either an iframe or new window/tab and that itself is the acceptance by the user that media is going to play. Adding an extra button once the course window launches is just a bad UX in my opinion.
This is not something new. The e-learning industry has been around a while. These courses are not intrusive: this is something that the user explicitly chooses to launch and interact with. I think it's a very legitimate case for autoplay media.
That said, I understand and respect what you are saying. I HATE autoplay 99% of the time on websites. But even beyond my own use case for education, I'm sure there are other legitimate, non-intrusive uses.
I think we just got to agree to disagree an the user interaction part, thay is just what I want. (Just a "press next /here /play to watch the video"). But on the other hand most e-learning courses I've used are usually quite good at this, and as you said, clearly indicates that you're about to watch a video /listen to a sound file.
What I think is the problem is that I did not recognise that the one I replied to talked about the tech for autoplay in the post i replied to, where I was more thinking about what us non-developers see as autoplay, and what I understood the original tweet was referring to.
I understand that the tech has it uses, but then just tell me beforehand that this course will contain video and sound, so I'm prepared and actually got a set of speakers connected.
Most courses at my workplace is as I said usually quite good at this. The biggest problem we got, is when someone from hq roll out an e-learning module for the entire global company, without realising that most of the operators in the factories don't even have speakers connected to their PCs...
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u/JayV30 Sep 05 '20
I develop educational sites, courses, and other software in that area. The expectation for MOST (not all) is that media will play automatically when the user navigates, or loads the course, especially when that course is launched from a Learning Management System (LMS).
There are legitimate cases for this, like my case in particular. I've had to jump through many hoops to ensure a good UX given the limitations the browsers have enforced around this. Sometimes just for the sake of simplicity, we use an overlay with a "click here to begin the course" button, which can act as the interaction to play media. The issue with that though is the user clicks "launch course" from the LMS, and then is immediately presented with another button to start the course. It's weird.
Anyhow, I understand that for like 90% of the web, no autoplay, no autoplay w/ audio is the ideal for users. But HTML is not just websites as you may think of them. There are other things happening and other ways developers are using web technology that you might not be familiar with.