What shall we do about IE11 and the lack of support for Web Audio?

[jbphet]

Internet Explorer does not support the Web Audio API. In the previous work that was done to support sound in our simulations, a fallback case was added to vibe/Sound.js to allow pre-recorded sounds to be played in this browser. As support for more elaborate sounds is integrated into PhET's code base, this workaround becomes harder to maintain, and may cause odd situations, since we intend to have pre-recorded sounds used in conjunction with synthesized sounds, and it will not be possible to create workarounds for the latter. Here are some possible approaches to this problem that I can think of, others can add more if they have ideas. These are listed in order of increasing development effort.

• drop support for IE entirely
• drop support for sound in IE, so users of this browser would only experience the visual aspects of the simulations
• add an option to the SoundClip constructor that would indicate whether it should be played in the fallback case, and identify the sounds for which this should be set during the sound design process
• continue to maintain support for pre-recorded sound clips, and play them as appropriate, but keep in mind that ONLY pre-recorded sounds would be supported and some situations with partial sonification will result

Assigning to @emily-phet, @ariel-phet, and @kathy-phet to get their input.

[jessegreenberg]

In case it impacts the decision, PhET does not support IE11 for our screen reader features. Any sonification added for IE11 would not be guaranteed to work together with a screen reader.

[emily-phet]

@jbphet - yes, we stopped supporting IE11 for screen reader access. We can drop support for IE wrt sonification.

@kathy-phet @ariel-phet Let me know if you have any concerns about this.

[ariel-phet]

Probably we need numbers on IE11 useage numbers to make a more informed decision about dropping it completely (doubt we can do that yet). But dropping support of sonification seems reasonable.

Let's ask @oliver-phet to get us some numbers.

[oliver-phet]

In the last month, IE11 was 94.51% of our Internet Explorer usage which is 4.01% of all browsers. In total 3.78% of usage.

[ariel-phet]

@oliver-phet can you do the same for Edge for comparison?

[oliver-phet]

Edge (all versions) is 3.64% of usage in the last month.

[emily-phet]

A note regarding accessibility - major screen reader software (JAWS) is dropping support of IE11, which is a primary reason we also dropped it from our testing. It's still heavily used by AT users for historical reasons but the community is trying to move away from it. It was greatly complicating our testing, and we had previously decided to test using only the primary browser for each of the three major US screen readers (JAWS, NVDA, and VO) so once JAWS moved away from IE11 we decided to stop testing with it.

[ariel-phet]

Agreed now, dropping IE for sonification work seems totally acceptable. However, we cannot yet drop IE 11 as a generally supported platform.

[ariel-phet]

So @jbphet to be clear, this option you mentioned seems most appropriate

drop support for sound in IE, so users of this browser would only experience the visual aspects of the simulations

[jbphet]

Great, thanks for the quick and clear decision. That's what I'll do. Closing.