Preferences Dialog: When only audio is some sound, simplify "Sound" text description

[kathy-phet]

In Number Play meeting, the "Sound" text description seemed to cause some confusion when there was no UI sound or sonification. Perhaps no only hide the toggle, but also simplify the description so its more general for these case, since "Audio" will be in every sim with a preferences dialog now.

I don't quite know everyone who should weigh in on that.

[jessegreenberg]

@chrisklus instead of disabling user-interface sounds would you be able to disable all sound in package.json by removing

supportsSound: true

in package.json?

Then this tab in Preferences (and the whole dialog) would go away in number-play.

[kathy-phet]

Number Play voices the numbers and has game sounds, so I suspect this won't work.

[jessegreenberg]

OK got it. If the voiced numbers were the only audio we could probably do this but we need supportsSound: true to still have game sounds.

[jessegreenberg]

Here is the control for the case of number-play

For the other sims where "UI sound" is disabled, maybe that description still makes sense because what plays are the custom sounds and sonifications. But Number-play also includes some synthesis.

I could imagine a few ways to handle this,

• Would you like to have an option for this blurb so that it can be customized for number-play?
• Would you like to add another toggle for speech synthesis in the audio tab? I don't think the sound team considered speech synthesis to be part of "Sound", which is why this description doesn't quite fit for number-play. This way you can enable count-aloud but disable all other sounds.
• Would you like to change this blurb to more generally describe all audio in this case? We should bring in the sound team here for a recommendation.
  • EDIT: I (JG) don't like this as much, the description describes PhET's current definition of Sound features which does not include speech synthesis.

@amanda-phet @kathy-phet over to you for next steps or to bring in others from the sound team.

[kathy-phet]

Related to: https://github.com/phetsims/joist/issues/729

[kathy-phet]

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

[amanda-phet]

Decision 10/20/22 for Number Play: we will put the "count aloud" feature under the Audio tab, so this discussion can be postponed.