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phetsims / joist

Joist is the main framework for PhET Interactive Simulations. Joist creates and displays the simulation content, home screen, navigation bar, About dialog, enables switching between tabs, and other framework-related features.
MIT License
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Terminology for audio and sound features #729

Open jessegreenberg opened 3 years ago

jessegreenberg commented 3 years ago

The current terminology can be described like

Graphically it is organized and presented to the user like this:

image

From https://github.com/phetsims/joist/issues/724, there was some feedback about the terminology used to label auditory features.

Specifically @samreid said

It's unclear from the proposal in #724 (comment) whether we prefer the proposed terminology, or if we feel painted into a corner since "sound" currently refers to sonification and sound effects and not voicing. Let's keep in mind that we may want to relax our definitions for this, especially for things that are client-facing. (If we want it to be called the sound manager instead of the audio manager).

And @pixelzoom said

I agree with the previous comment, especially for public-facing terminology. Expecting a typical user (or even developers/designers) to understand the difference between "sound" and "audio" is unreasonable.

PhET's current distinction between "audio" and "sound" is non-standard and uniquely PhET. Sound is a generic word, coming from any source. Audio is sound coming from a recording, transmission, or electronic device. Making up new definitions for these terms is confusing to everyone.

In my opinion the organization of the Audio tab is clear and the descriptions do a good job of describing the different accessibility features.

But for the sake of discussion it could look like this: image

I will bring this up in an upcoming design meeting to discuss if anything should change.

jessegreenberg commented 1 year ago

I was reviewing joist issues and found this one. @kathy-phet or @arouinfar can you please review this feedback and comment on whether this warrants time? It is mostly a design issue about how to present "audio" and "sound" publicly. But if changes are required it would involve lots of renaming in code.

arouinfar commented 1 year ago

Thanks for writing this up @jessegreenberg. I agree, we are using the terms "audio" and "sound" strangely. Based on the definitions, "sound" is a better catch-all for all auditory features, and the term "sound effects" more accurately describes the non-speech sounds produced by the simulation.

I think at some point we considered naming the set of preferences "Auditory", which by definition is "relating to the sense of hearing". This is parallel to "Visual" which is "related to seeing or sight". I wonder if we simply shortened "Auditory" to "Audio" which was inappropriate, by definition.

I don't know what to do in this situation, however. I know we already spent a ton of development time naming everything with "audio" and "sound" throughout the code. We're also on the cusp of republishing PhET-iO sims, so if things need to change, they need to change now. Any change we make in the future will break the API and require editing the documentation.

This is @kathy-phet's call, but I will go ahead and mark this as blocks publication since we need to decide before publishing PhET-iO sims.

zepumph commented 1 year ago

Marking for the PhET-iO publication pipeline for discussion.

kathy-phet commented 1 year ago

Related to: https://github.com/phetsims/joist/issues/871

kathy-phet commented 1 year ago

Related to https://github.com/phetsims/joist/issues/736

zepumph commented 1 year ago

Not blocking the current PhET-iO release schedule.

zepumph commented 1 year ago

What is the blocking status of this issue? I am trying to publish Ratio and Proportion (phet brand) and Friction (phet-io + phet brand) imminently. @arouinfar @kathy-phet does anything need to change here?

zepumph commented 1 year ago

I have continued with the publication of RC, and have no response in 26 days. I perhaps should wait for a response here but Ratio and Proportion is quite late to publication right now, and I'm trying to get it out the door before the new year. Please let me know if this effects Ratio and Proportion, or Friction (phet + phet-io brand) to be sent to QA very very soon.

zepumph commented 1 year ago

I'm getting ready for an RC of Friction, and similarly to RaP it would be nice to hear that this isn't blocking that sim. Please do let me know if we need to raise the priority on this, as I plan to take RC shas for Friction quite soon.

arouinfar commented 1 year ago

Sorry you keep bumping up against this @zepumph. I'll remove the blocks-publication tag.

Changing the terminology will break the API and also require changes to the description, voicing, and translation strings. The PhET-iO migration rules are likely simple, but the strings seem like a bigger change. It's probably not worth changing at this point, but I can't decide that alone. This issue is on the Preferences dialog project board, so I'll leave this open for now.