I’m really new to Pressbooks and am just testing it out. I’d like to get audio to automatically play when a page is viewed. Is this possible?
I tried to embed media but don’t like that the media image shows (as a somewhat obnoxious Soundcloud player). Is there a way to have only the images I’ve chosen and the text I’ve pasted into the editor show but have media playing? I’d like readers to be able to hear the audio as they are reading (like someone reading a book to a child as they follow along) without the distraction of the Soundcloud player.
Also, I’m by no means a techie–just someone working on an art project and trying to see if Pressbooks is right for me. So simple language (any help really) would be much appreciated.
(It doesn’t look like Customer Service is available for self-publishers.)
Hi Anne,
Short answer is yes, you can set audio files to autoplay in Pressbooks. To do so, you can click the ‘Add Media’ button from the visual editor and upload/insert an audio file into your book. Once you’ve done this, hovering over the player will show you a pencil and an x.
Click the pencil to see something called ‘Audio Details’ (shown below). If you select the ‘Autoplay’ option here, the file will automatically begin playing when a user visits the webpage which includes the embedded audio file.
That’s how you can do it. Whether you should do this is another question. A lot of people (including some accessibility experts) discourage creators from automatically playing media on websites without the user initiating the action. Something to consider?
Thank you so much! I will try this and report back.
I agree about accessibility and normally would follow that advice, but I’m currently only creating this for a specific group of people. In the future, though, I will probably redo this in other, more accessible formats.
