I was shocked to find that only about 10% of blind people in the UK use
screen readers, mainly due to inhibitive costs and the (generally)
complicated set-up involved and learning process. I think the idea put
forward about automatically having sound start was so to help address
that issue. I don't know how the figures are elsewhere in the world but
would be surprised if they were massively different.
A lot of interesting points were made regarding the web becoming more of
an extension of broadcasting rather than print and a move away from text
towards multimedia. Were that to be the case then we would almost
certainly change the way we think in terms of sound being played
automatically. Kind of like treating a browser as more of an interactive
television than an interactive magazine.
I'm still trying to let the ideas settle down in my head as they have
turned some thoughts upside down and I still disagree with some of them.
I was just interested in what Ix people would think... (being primarily
a standardista front end developer it goes against a lot of things I
believe(d) to be true).
-----Original Message-----
Couldn't that be countered with an added skip link or similar device
("start audio")? I know that could open a Pandora's Box of 1,001 skip
links, but it might be a method to let someone know early on that audio
content is available on the page.
Of course, one could make the argument that there should be text within
the page that is hidden from 'normal' users but is available to those
using assistive technologies - thus, they would get the content anyway.
If a link at the beginning of the section announced an audio track, they
would have the choice of either activating the audio track provided or
having the content delivered to them through a screen reader or similar
device.
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