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phetsims / reactants-products-and-leftovers

"Reactants, Products and Leftovers" is an educational simulation in HTML5, by PhET Interactive Simulations.
GNU General Public License v3.0
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Decide whether to turn off UI sounds on next publication #74

Open markgammon opened 2 years ago

markgammon commented 2 years ago

As part of the work done for https://github.com/phetsims/vegas/issues/77, UI sounds got turned on for this simulation. Before the sim is published again from master, we should decide whether to turn the UI sounds off, leave them on and design and implement sounds for the rest of the interactions, or publish with a partial sound design.

If the decision is to turn them off, this can be accomplished by adding the following line to the end of the sim's -main.js file:

  soundManager.setOutputLevelForCategory( 'user-interface', 0 );
pixelzoom commented 1 year ago

Work on this sim has resumed -- see #77, #78 and #79.

Common code provides good coverage of UI sounds for this sim.

But the spinners (NumberSpinner) need work. There has been no sound design/implementation for NumberSpinner, so it just has the default "button click" sound. To be consistent with other "value" controls (slider, etc.) the pitch of the sound should be related to the spinner value -- higher pitch for larger value. Complicating things a bit is the fact that spinners have a dynamic range. I discussed with @jbphet, and we see 4 options for this sim:

(1) Disable UI sound for the 1.3 release (#77). Add it in some future release. Hope that NumberSpinner has proper sound by then.

(2) Use NumberSpinner "as is", with the default "button click" sound. While we can technically say the sim "supports sound", this option doesn't have a lot of value to the user, because doesn't tell them whether the value increased or decreased.

(3) Do a proper sound design/implementation for NumberSpinner. This will involve more people, take longer (probably weeks or months), but will benefit other sims that use NumberSpinner.

(4) Disable the default sounds for NumberSpinner and do something custom for RPAL. This is something that I could do myself, probably in an afternoon.

@kathy-phet @arouinfar How do you want to proceed? My recommendation is option (1), if you have the resources and it fits the timeline for publishing this sim. My second choice is option (4).

arouinfar commented 1 year ago

NumberSpinner is so integral to this sim. I do not think the default button sound provides particularly useful feedback for the NumberSpinner interaction. I would rather disable sound (1) than leave it as-is (2).

I strongly vote for option (3). I don't know the timeline for this particular sim, but If our goal as a project is to publish sims with a basic inclusive feature set, we need to invest time into common code as these sorts of issues arise. Otherwise, we will just end up kicking the can down the road (to probably just kick it again in the future).

I don't know if alt input is also on the table for this release, but supportsInteractiveDescription=true shows good coverage, though we would need to adjust the focus order.