Why Embedded Audio Player needs to look like a video?

Question

My usual community forum presence is in the Canvas Developers group. I'm also planning on asking our CSM about this, but I'm curious to know from the general community why a simple audio playback interface is not available when inserting media that is 100% audio only, yet the playback interface makes it look like a video. Simple HTML5 audio player varies between browsers, so I suppose it could be just trying to make it consistent for all users regardless of browsers. A few months ago lately the media playback interface has been updated such that all media is minimized by default (like it would be for a DocViewer supported file), and then when clicked on it expands/maximizes to a ginormous size that takes up way too much screen real estate needed for a simple audio player.

Prior to June of 2024:

When copied to a new shell it's 'reduced' to this interface:

While it doesn't expand when the play button is clicked, it still seems like it could look more like a simple audio player with no need for a visual area (i.e. for video). Here's the simple version that appears for a HTML5 audio element for Chromium/Edge/Chrome:

In short, the current media playback player seems like could have additional options for course designers to make better use of the screen real estate, such as the case for foreign language courses. We're already seeing some poor performance of pages loading multiple instances of the playback engine and failing to display them all. For example, here's one for embedded videos for an ASL course:

When copied forward to a new course shell it breaks further down the page:

I've got a few tickets raised with Support about this because I'm curious what the community thinks and also worried about what Instructors returning for Fall 2024 will notice different about their content when they set up their courses using their Spring 2024 course shells as the source to copy from.

themidiman · Answer

Accessibility in mind does make sense for audio file needing captions. So if there was a way to accept an answer for just that part of my question in the community, I would do that. Unfortunately I chose to put more than one question into the same post so I can't. ">😐

themidiman · Answer

Thanks for being a listening ear @chriscas .

I'm pointing the finger directly at the RCE embedded media player which also apparently will take the file from the Files area and treat it as though it were uploaded into the RCE.

If anyone from Instructure or the general community is reading this and can offer insights to my other question about the fact that a video player shows up when it's only audio file being played back would also be welcomed. Once we have our meeting with our new CSM I will reference this post to them, and return with what we learn/gain from that discussion.

themidiman · Answer

Hi @chriscas

These are .mov files that the instructor uploaded to the Files area of their course. Preliminary responses from Instructure Support about the 403 Forbidden Rate Limited error message aren't producing any easy solutions. There is a way to edit the HTML in the RCE to revert back to the 'minimized' thumbnail version of the video, but once the course copies to a new shell they are back to what Instructure support is calling a UI/UX unification for all media files, and we're back to square one. Whilst grappling with the tech assigned to our case not understanding that the 'upgrade' is causing us a headache, I do have a workaround that would involve embedding from within Canvas Studio or migrating these video files to an outside source like YouTube or 3rd party web server. For now the video player that comes for free within the Canvas RCE is the culprit that we hope we can get someone in Instructure Engineering to admit wasn't fully thought out given this use case.

Support is telling us to solve the issue is to not embed so many videos on the same page. In the case of a quiz, we have been told to set the quiz to display one question at a time.  But in my example above, these videos are for a vocabulary page for an American Sign Language course and there are at least 12 of these vocabulary pages in the course...every time the course is copied we'd have to edit the HTML to revert them back to the new upgraded/improved UI/UX versions of the video player. They were working just fine before the UI/UX update. Being told that we're using the product the wrong way after it was working just fine isn't very good support IMO, but we're working through that support tech's comment via our CSM.

I'll come back to this question once we get an audience with our CSM.