Enable a hotkey to play a subject

[seanmiller26]

Package

Choose from the list:

• app-content-pages
• app-project
• lib-classifier
• lib-panoptes-js
• lib-react-components
• unknown

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.

Let's give volunteers the option of having a dedicated key that they can use to play/pause video/flipbook subjects.

Describe the solution you'd like

The letter P which stands for play/pause, for instance.

Additional context

Add any other context or screenshots about the feature request here.

[eatyourgreens]

FWIW, the video player uses space to play/pause, which is pretty standard for media players on the web. You do have to focus the player first, either by clicking on it or tabbing to it.

[eatyourgreens]

Here's a video of me using the video keyboard controls to play a video in Chrome. When the video player has keyboard focus:

• Space toggles play/pause.
• The cursor keys scrub backwards and forwards through a paused video.

Screen.Recording.2024-05-03.at.14.39.02.mov

[eatyourgreens]

The space bar also toggles play/pause in the flipbook viewer, when the subject image is focused (tested on Daily Minor Planet.)

There is one difference from PFE. With PFE, I can click a subject to focus it. FEM subjects aren’t clickable like that. I have to tab to the subject image, which is inconvenient.

Try it on Daily Minor Planet here. Tab through the page until the subject image is selected, and you'll find that you can toggle play/pause with the spacebar. There is one, big, level AA accessibility failure on that page: the subject image is focusable but has no visible focus indicator in Firefox.

In Chrome, the focused image has a thin blue focus indicator, which would probably also fail. It's really easy to miss in this screenshot.

[eatyourgreens]

For keyboard and screen reader users, I would suggest:

• have skip links that take you from the top of the page to the classifier (or the classifier subject?)
• have clear focus indicators to indicate that the flipbook player or video player has focus.
• enable volunteers to select the player by clicking/tapping on it.
• communicate that both players support standard keyboard shortcuts that volunteers are probably already accustomed to from other sites (eg. YouTube?)