quelkaima
commented
1 year ago Firstly, THANK YOU for showing me where to go for this! Secondly, I agree. There has to be a better place to disable autoplaying of gifs and videos because, IMO, this is an accessibility issue.
There should be a dedicated section of settings with all kinds of accessibility options, including disabling autoplay. If there can't be a search feature in the Settings menu, at least give us an Accessibility sub-menu to to put sounds and visual/appearance settings in there. Autoplaying of gifs, stickers, and videos would be great to put under visual accessibility!
Is your feature request related to a problem?
I remembered that there is, or at least used to be, a way to disable video autoplay in the Telegram Desktop client (using version 4.8.1 on Linux currently). However, I found it completely impossible to find it in the settings. Even after doing a Google search, it took me a while to figure it out (presumably because the organization of the settings has changed).
Let me describe my thinking.
First, I go to Settings -> Chat Settings. This seems like the "clearly correct" option to choose if I want to change how videos are or are not autoplayed in chat.
But clearly there's nothing there.
I remember that in some software, "even more" settings is hidden in some weird menu, so I try the "..." menu next to the "Chat Settings" title. It shows only the entry "Create new theme". Incidentally, UX-wise, I would suggest this placement is strange; it's in the title bar, applying to the whole dialog, not under Themes. So I go back from the Chat Settings dialog.
Next I try Settings->Battery and Animations. It's not an exact match, but at least it's quite close. There's Animations in Chats, which is kind of promising, but it doesn't show this.
Ok, Settings->Advanced it is then.
There's again Battery and Animations in this menu. I try that. I get the same Battery and Animations dialog.
Experimental settings in this dialog? No, not there either.
After Googling and checking twice, I discovered the settings under Settings->Advanced->Automatic media download. To me, the autoplay feature has nothing to do with download, and indeed, the videos I wanted to stop have obviously already been downloaded.
Also, I must say I don't know what "Round video messages" are, but it sounds like I'd like to disable them too :-)
Describe the solution you'd like
I think the most discoverable solution would be a dialog that opens from Chat Settings -> Autoplay with the different options currently in the Automatic media download dialog. There's already similar settings there like "Loop animated stickers". Battery and Animations would also be a somewhat logical place for this.
Describe alternatives you've considered
A search feature for the settings could also be a great way to make this thing more discoverable. For example, Firefox has this:
Additional context
No response