Users must have a way to pause or stop any audio that automatically plays for more than three seconds.
What to do?
- Don’t have any audio that automatically plays on your website.
- If you do have audio that automatically plays, limit it to three seconds and provide for an easy way to adjust, mute, pause, or stop the video.
Resources
Plain English Explanation
One of the fundamental principles of accessibility is to put the user in control of the page’s content; they choose what they want to access and not the website owner’s.
This success criteria drives that point home and is fairly simple to meet.
WCAG discourages the practice of having any automatic audio but provides a quick three second exception.
I highly recommend not having any automatic audio.