Did you ever happen to furiously mute the sound of your computer because of a web site making it?

It is near 9 a.m. in the morning. My wife worked late yesterday and she is still sleeping. I am reading my mails before I jump to work. The owner of the blogs that I read regularly contacted me privately and asked to subscribe to his newsletter. The blog is great and the value of the newsletter is great. So I subscribed.

The subscriptions happens through a 3rd party web site. It seems that this web site wants to be "accessible". It is good to be accessible but they decided to read the text on the screen aloud (much louder than average) automatically. Thank you very much. My wife may be awoken now and I feel ashamed :(

Why do I write about it?

Very often technical people forget a very simple but the most important rule of a

Normal people do not expect your web site to scream aloud.

It is a cool feeling when you solve a technical challenge. It is cool when you create a flashy animated flash site with a lot of music ("flashy screaming flash"). Cool for you. But it is not cool for a visitor, who needs it now but has to wait for 5 or 10 minutes until the site loads. And it is not cool at all to force him to turn off his speaker in a hurry.

Do not behave rude to the visitor!

The good alternative would be to propose a three versions of the site on the first page in the order of preference:

  • Flash with sound
  • Flash with sound (muted)
  • HTML version

Of course, not everyone can or want create several versions of the web site. At least do not be too rude and mute sound by default. There is no value in that electronic music that you play anyway. But many visitors will appreciate when you care about them (and their sleeping wives). You always can provide a control to enable sound, don't you?

Hope next time you will mute the sound of your web site by default.