UX Blog » Testing

Auto playing videos

Barry — Tue, 28 Feb 2012 16:04:47 +0000

…are A Very Bad Thing for usability and accessibility

I went to a talk on accessibility last night by these good people:

Northern User Experience: Accessibility in Practice
http://northern-user-experience.org/2012/01/24/next-leeds-event-monday-27th-february-accessibility-in-practice

There were some really interesting things highlighted, but a key issue for me was to do with the use of auto playing videos.

Users hate auto play

I recently lab-tested a tourist attraction website with a group of their potential customers. The site had several auto playing videos on it, and every test participant expressed a dislike for them.

Regardless of this the client wanted their videos to auto play, so auto play they did.

What hadn’t occurred to me while I was trying in vein to stress that they were “bad usability” was that they are also “bad accessibility“.

Let me explain:

The JAWS screen reader

Visually impaired users will typically use a Windows-based screen reader application called JAWS. There are other screen readers but JAWS has about 75% market share, so it’s as good as the defacto standard.

JAWS reads aloud the active content on a PC screen.

It also has special extensions to add extra functionality within Internet Explorer web browsers, allowing it to interact with elements on a web page in a more advanced manner than simply reading the page contents aloud.

The talk I went to last night highlighted that a typical JAWS user will do the following when landing on a new web page:

When the web page has fully loaded the screen reader will read out the page title
The user will then make a decision based on this page title:
- If they think they are on the correct page they will then bring up a dialogue box that lists all the subheadings on the current page – the application starts to read back this list to the user, allowing them to choose one they want to hear more about
- If they do not think they are on the correct page yet, they will bring up a different dialogue list of all the links on the page, which the application starts to read back to the user

Note that in both instances, the screen reader is speaking back the page’s content – this is critical to understanding why auto play videos are A Very Bad Thing.

Imagine now if that web page has an auto playing video on it, with music, effects and even vocal soundtracks. The user is unable to hear their screen reader because the video is drowning it out.

Also, because the videos are usually written in Flash, the screen reader is unable to guide the user on how to stop the video. This means it’s even worse if the video is set to automatically loop as they have no way of ever stopping it.

I’ve seen this in action and it’s a cacophony of clashing sounds. It’s all the user can do to get off the damn page as quick as possible. It’s a very unpleasant experience and effectively bars the user from ever seeing content on that page.

Lawsuits are expensive as well as bad PR

To underline this, a group of American women recently sued Disney for a bucket-load of cash over various accessibility issues at their parks and on their website, one of which was the use of auto playing videos on their site.

http://www.undpegov.org/taxonomy/term/313

As I understand it, Disney settled out of court without actually fixing the issues on their site, and so the RNIB have since taken up a similar lawsuit against them to try and get the underlying problems addressed.

You’d think that with Disney being a major tourist resort they would be trying to be as “inclusive” as possible wouldn’t you?

Forehead-slapping moments

There were several other forehead-slapping insights from last night’s talk that we should all be listening to as web designers and developers, but this one was especially relevant for me given my recent experiences lab testing a tourist attraction site with auto playing videos.