Why is audio muted / What is the "click to listen" button / Can music auto-play?

Music cannot auto-play due to browser limitations. Read on for a longer explanation...

As of April 17th, 2018, Google Chrome introduced additional features to protect people from abusive ads (view the Press Release here). This presents unique challenges for sites that display meaningful audio and video content, which means sites like CNN and Vimeo are blocked from auto-playing video clips. For Tourbuzz, it is making it difficult for us to support all of the media (videos, narrations, and music) autoplay features we have built over the years.

For Chrome, Safari, & Firefox, we have been able to quickly provide an updated experience in our designs to help alleviate these new pain points.

Here’s what to expect from the Tourbuzz experience in Chrome, Safari, & Firefox:

1. The tour will start with audio (music) muted as these browsers will not allow the tour audio (music) to autoplay. You will have to click the volume (mute) button to activate the audio (music).
2. Videos that have audio will autoplay the video with the audio track muted and users will now see a prompt to “click to listen.”
3. These browsers are preventing us from supporting narration that has been added to photo media items. Today, narration on photo media items are not supported. We need to do further research to understand if we can support this in the future.

If you would like to read more about the Coalition for Better Ads, you can read about it here: https://www.betterads.org/