Hello everybody. Josh here with Online ADA, bringing you another video covering the WCAG accessibility guidelines.
In this video we’re covering 1.4.2, audio control. This is a level A requirement.
Let’s jump into the description. If any audio on a webpage plays automatically for more than three seconds, either a mechanism is available to pause or stop the audio, or a mechanism is available to control audio volume independently from the overall system volume level.
This is a specific situation that I have not run into at all in my audits. It’s generally just not a good idea to be playing audio automatically at users. That’s gonna turn a lot of people off to the website anyway, but if you do have a use case where that is necessary, this article specifically is covering any situation where the audio plays for longer than three seconds. If it does play for longer than three seconds then we need to have a control for the user, somewhere near the top, one of the first things on the page. It’s going to either disable it site wide, disable it for this page or control the volume of it independently of the computers volume.
So, that’s really the gist of this article and there’s not a whole lot more to say about it. Before I let you go I do want to note that there is a note on this article from the WCAG documentation. I’m gonna go ahead and read that.
Note 1: Since any content that does not meet this success criteria can interfere with a user’s ability to use the whole page, all content on the web page, whether or not it is used to meet other success criteria, must meet this success criteria. So this is a very important success criteria. A very important article. We need to make sure that we are not overwhelming or inundating users with audio on your site that they can’t control.
This is a short and sweet article, but it is right to the point. I hope you enjoyed it and I’ll see you on the next video.