Disable play/pause key on keyboard for video stimuli?

[atfrederiksen]

Is there a way to disable the play/pause key on the keyboard for video stimuli. I'm trying to avoid that my participants pause the video.
I have auto-play enabled and there are no clickable buttons visible. But pressing the play/pause button on the keyboard still pauses the video.

[Ting]

Ah...this is a good point! Let us find a keyboard with a play button and get back to you after testing it. It might be a hardware-level function that's hard to disable.

[Ting]

So, it turns out that we can intercept these media keys in Firefox completely. For Chrome, the stop button cannot be intercepted (apparently that's an intentional feature of Chrome - giving users the power to always stop video content on a page). Unfortunately if participants hit the stop button the video will stop and the trial will get stuck.

Do you want us to implement this interception, leaving it partially broken on Chrome? I guess that's still a step up from the status quo? oh well...!

[atfrederiksen]

Chrome is not making things easy recently! For myself, it would be preferable to let participants pause the video, rather than the trial getting stuck (if I understand your explanation correctly). In the former case, at least they can restart it if they hit the button by accident (or needed a break).

[Ting]

OK...let us investigate it more. What we could perhaps do is intercept all media keys in Firefox, and for Chrome, allow the "play" key (which tends to be the "pause" key as well) to work *only after* the participant hits the stop key. That way at least participants would have a way to get out of the situation.

Oh...Chrome has never been easy. It has a (very strong) opinion of its own.

Thanks for this suggestion! We want to pay attention to little things like this and make FF unique.

[Ting]

Hey! I have great news - we are able to find a way to do it in both Firefox and Chrome! If nothing unexpected happens, this little tweak will be made available to all researchers on the grammar update on Monday 8/16.

Thanks again for this suggestion. It's actually been pretty fun to fiddle with Chrome to achieve this functionality.

[atfrederiksen]

Hey! I have great news - we are able to find a way to do it in both Firefox and Chrome! If nothing unexpected happens, this little tweak will be made available to all researchers on the grammar update on Monday 8/16.

Thanks again for this suggestion. It's actually been pretty fun to fiddle with Chrome to achieve this functionality.

Very cool! Looking forward to the update.