I've been of two minds about blogs where music plays automatically when your visitor arrives. On the one hand, I desperately hate it. A lot. I often listen to music when I'm online, so then your music is clashing with my music and it's annoying. I also sometimes open sites in five or six tabs, so when music starts up, I have to hunt for which blog it is and often scroll down pretty far to find the button to turn it off. And don't even get me started about when I used to read blogs while holding a sleeping infant and music would start up...
The only reason I didn't reject it utterly was that I once saw someone take a poll of their readers, and most of them liked the music. So in an attempt to be open-minded, I thought that in some cases it was an issue of knowing your audience, and if they liked it, then perhaps it was okay.
While going through research material the other day, though, I came across this tidbit in Improving accessibility for motor impaired users over at Webcredible:
Some motor impaired web users utilise voice recognition software to navigate through web pages. If pages on your website start to play audio without users knowing about this in advance then this can severely conflict with the voice recognition software.
There's nothing wrong with using audio but do make sure that it doesn't start by default when users arrive at the page. Instead, provide a link/button that users can select to start the audio.
Oops.
My frustration at hearing two different kinds of music overlap is likely minimal compared to the experience of someone who actually can't navigate the page because they can't hear their software. Whether the person is motor impaired or visually impaired, if they depend on audio cues for their software in order to read your blog, automatic music - or automatically playing a video with sound - is quite a roadblock.
My frustration at having to click through tabs and scroll down on blogs to figure out where to click to make the music stop is also likely minimal compared to the work required of someone with a visual impairment to even find the source of the noise.
So bloggers, let's be kind, and make our music and other audio opt in.
Apple just got a patent for a control on an internet device (web browser, iPhone app, etc.) that would set the sound level for audio coming from web pages separate from the rest of the computer. So MySpace geeks could crank it up and listen to their auto-play music to their heart's content and folks at work could mute all web sounds and not tip off their co-workers when they do a little non-work browsing (or even work browsing these days with some damn banner ads).
I agreed with the journalist that posted the info: this is one patent I want to see implemented NOW.
Hopefully, Apple's thinking about accessibility and changing the volume for web pages separately from screen readers....
"Apple just got a patent for a control on an internet device (web browser, iPhone app, etc.) that would set the sound level for audio coming from web pages separate from the rest of the computer." You mean like Microsoft Vista has had built in for a couple years now?