Video: All - background music

[rachaelbradley]

Rough timestamp

This comment relates to all videos. I will try to go through tonight and timestamp specific severe issue points.

Suggestion

Either remove the music in the background music entirely or provide alternate video options that do not include background music or limit music to the very start and end of the video.

Rationale

Distracting background noise goes against 4.4.11 Ensure Foreground Content is not Obscured by Background (Pattern) from Making Content Usable. While Content Usable is not a normative specification, it supports the COGA community and generally, it is good practice to follow our own guidance.

In addition, the balance of the music audio track and speech track shifts and sometimes the music dominates making it difficult to hear the speaker ( I will try to mark these tonight).

Level of importance

High

[shawna-slh]

+1 to:

• quiet music at beginning and ending
• very, very quiet or no music throughout main content

[bakkenb]

+1 to much softer music throughout all videos. There were only a couple of videos that I thought the music was soft enough to fully concentrate on the dialogue. Even in those the music got a bit louder and became distracting again.

I would lower volume by at least half in most of the videos. Okay to be a bit louder in the intro and outro.

[shawna-slh]

Here is the GitHub issue that I referred to in the meeting: https://github.com/w3c/wai-easy-checks/issues/118

[shawna-slh]

I listened to V2 Sophie. I think many people will still find the background music too distracting.

[daniel-montalvo]

+1. I did not notice that in the Sophie video, but if we are certain that some will, I'd say it's good for us to make it even lower.