17698 2012-07-05 14:26:06 +0000 Safeguards against audio-sensitive epileptic seizures 2012-09-20 06:59:53 +0000 1 1 1 Unclassified AudioWG Web Audio Processing: Use Cases and Requirements unspecified PC All CLOSED NEEDSINFO P2 normal TBD 1 olivier.thereaux dave.null cooper joe philipj public-audio oldest_to_newest 69651 0 olivier.thereaux 2012-07-05 14:26:06 +0000 From the “Review of Web Audio Processing: Use Cases and Requirements” http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-audio/2012AprJun/0852.html Need a requirement to provide ways to avoid triggering audio-sensitive epileptic seizures. The fact that sounds from a variety of sources might be combined, including script-generated sounds and transformations that could have unplanned artifacts, mean the final sound output may be less under the author's control than studio-edited sound. It is important to find ways to reduce unexpected effects triggering audio-sensitive epileptic seizures. To some extent this means warning authors to be careful, but any features we can build into the technology, we should. Unfortunately this is a new field to me and I don't know all the specifics, so it will take research (which of course I volunteer to be involved in, just looking for a placeholder for the issue now). A quick scan online suggests that certain beat frequencies and reverberance effects are known sources of problems. A set of user preferences allowing users to disable or control certain Web application-generated audio transformations might help with the latter issue. 71364 1 philipj 2012-07-24 09:47:53 +0000 Surely this belongs on the operating system level, since it could the combination of <audio>, Web Audio API and Flash video running in 3 different browsers that produces the problematic sound? 73068 2 joe 2012-08-30 15:10:00 +0000 I have looked for references on the web to this topic that point to information about how such audio stimuli might be characterized as likely to trigger a seizure, but so far have been unable to find any such information. What seems to be agreed is that in some cases audio does dispose certain epilepsy sufferers towards having a seizure, but that the nature of the stimulus is highly variable. In some cases, for example, the stimulus can be a specific song (http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=musicophobia-when-your-fa) Between the fact that 1) there's no apparent objective way to characterize an audio signal as epilepsy-inducing or not, and 2) Web Audio can't access the complete. summed audio output of a user's computer, I am not sure there's a way to make concrete progress on this issue. 73164 3 olivier.thereaux 2012-09-03 10:10:49 +0000 (In reply to comment #2) > Between the fact that 1) there's no apparent objective way to characterize an > audio signal as epilepsy-inducing or not, and 2) Web Audio can't access the > complete. summed audio output of a user's computer, I am not sure there's a way > to make concrete progress on this issue. Good points Joe. I'm going to park this issue for now. 74117 4 olivier.thereaux 2012-09-20 06:59:53 +0000 Hearing no objection after a couple of weeks, closing.