Native Audio - HTML5

HTML and CSS Reference

In-Depth Information

The HTML5 specification says that all child elements of audio other than source should

be ignored. This means that providing additional fallback content won't result in any

negative consequences for a user on an HTML5-capable browser.

For example, you could include fallback Flash:

Video and Flash are not supported by your browser.

</object>

</audio>

Or you could simply describe what the audio file contains and include a link to the file

for a user to download and play on his device's media player (along with some gentle

encouragement to upgrade to a new browser):

Your browser does not support HTML5 audio. You should upgrade. In the

meantime, download <a href="audio.ogg">episode 42 of Learning to Love

HTML5</a>.

</audio>

Accessible alternatives

Another challenge with HTML5 audio is that alternative content for multimedia

doesn't quite exist in practice. Theoretically , accessibility would be delivered through

two steps: first, multimedia authors include a subtitles file in the container .ogv

or .mp3 , and then browsers give users an interface to access those subtitles and captions.

Using the alt attribute with img isn't a practical solution. It isn't what

the HTML5 specification intends, and, more important, assistive tech-

nologies don't process audio fallback content in that fashion.

For now, there's not much more than a few experimental approaches you can try:

• Accessible HTML5 Video with JavaScripted captions: http://dev.opera.com/arti

• HTML5 and Timed Media: http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/rad/2009/08/html5.html

• Demos of HTML5 Video and Audio Tag Accessibility: http://www.annodex.net/

~silvia/itext/

You may note that some of these resources reference video. That's because HTML5

audio and video are so similar that the approaches described can be applied to both (as

discussed in Chapter 5 ).

HTML5

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