Angus at InfoForce Services wrote:
Thank you for all the responses. I mainly chose MIDI for accessibility to Dial up users. I would rather use MP3 myself.
How about using MP3, but *not* having the music play unless the user explicitly activates it? There's nothing more irritating than being in an office, hitting a page, and blasting other cow-workers with some horrible sounds. Or, if we are talking about accessibility: how about screenreader users who come along to the site and get your music playing on top of their screenreader's audio output? If anything, that makes the page less accessible. As for dialup users, if you show a progress bar as with most flash audio widgets, they can get a direct feedback as to whether they want to wait for your music to download and play (or you could make it stream / pseudo stream quite easily).
MIDI is very 80's, and pages that play music when you load them are annoying for a large number of users (and yes, that includes all those whiz-bang flash sites where everything makes a sound and some techno-music blares out during the intro; by all means have the option of having music/sounds, but offer the user a choice to disable audio *before* they get to the page).
Sorry, another rant... -- Patrick H. Lauke __________________________________________________________ re·dux (adj.): brought back; returned. used postpositively [latin : re-, re- + dux, leader; see duke.] www.splintered.co.uk | www.photographia.co.uk http://redux.deviantart.com __________________________________________________________ Web Standards Project (WaSP) Accessibility Task Force http://webstandards.org/ __________________________________________________________ ****************************************************** The discussion list for http://webstandardsgroup.org/ See http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm for some hints on posting to the list & getting help ******************************************************
