audio=disabled hides navbar icon but doesn't disable audio

[arouinfar]

For phetsims/qa#706

Steps to reproduce

1. Run 1.5.0-rc.1 with audio=disabled
2. Open Preferences dialog and select Audio tab
3. Turn on Audio Features toggle
4. Sim now makes sound and there is no way to mute it (short of muting the browser tab)

In master, the sim crashes if you try turn on Audio Features with audio=disabled and this error appears in the console:

Uncaught Error: Assertion failed: must be connected to a display to use UtteranceQueue features
    at window.assertions.assertFunction (assert.js:25)
    at NavigationBarAudioToggleButton.alertDescriptionUtterance (ParallelDOM.js:2683)
    at pressedListener (NavigationBarAudioToggleButton.js:169)
    at TinyProperty.emit (TinyEmitter.js:86)
    at BooleanProperty._notifyListeners (Property.js:271)
    at BooleanProperty.set (Property.js:186)
    at BooleanProperty.set value [as value] (Property.js:341)
    at ToggleSwitch.Action.parameters.validValues (ToggleSwitch.js:169)
    at Action.execute (Action.js:227)
    at DragListener.end [as _end] (ToggleSwitch.js:239)

Troubleshooting Info

Name: Balloons and Static Electricity
URL: https://bayes.colorado.edu/dev/phettest/balloons-and-static-electricity/balloons-and-static-electricity_en.html?ea&brand=phet&audio=disabled
Version: 1.6.0-dev.0 (unbuilt)
Features missing: applicationcache, applicationcache, touch
Flags: pixelRatioScaling
User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/93.0.4577.82 Safari/537.36
Language: en-US
Window: 1440x789
Pixel Ratio: 2/1
WebGL: WebGL 1.0 (OpenGL ES 2.0 Chromium)
GLSL: WebGL GLSL ES 1.0 (OpenGL ES GLSL ES 1.0 Chromium)
Vendor: WebKit (WebKit WebGL)
Vertex: attribs: 16 varying: 15 uniform: 1024
Texture: size: 16384 imageUnits: 16 (vertex: 16, combined: 80)
Max viewport: 16384x16384
OES_texture_float: true
Dependencies JSON: {}

[arouinfar]

The bug in master has been logged in phetsims/joist#746.

[jbphet]

I'm not sure that I agree that the described behavior is problematic. Above, @arouinfar said:

Sim now makes sound and there is no way to mute it

There actually is a way to mute it, and that it to turn audio back off by using the same control that the user would have had to use to turn it on. If they turned it off, they would have to be aware that this control exists.

@arouinfar - Back to you for your thoughts on this. If you think the behavior is suboptimal, let's set up a design meeting slot to discuss it with other members of the design team, and please include @emily-phet and @jessegreenberg.

There was a bunch of work on this done under phetsims/joist#724. I started looking through it to figure out if the current behavior was ever explicitly specified, but it's a long issue and I didn't want to take the time to work through it unless necessary.

As an aside, and for what it's worth, the bug in master also exists on the 1.5 branch, it just doesn't show up in the built version because asserts are stripped out, and the code seems to handle it okay.

[jbphet]

Oh, and @arouinfar - we're hoping to the next RC on the 1.5 branch very soon, so if you think that this should block that release, please say so right away.

[jessegreenberg]

The common code issue for this is phetsims/joist#746. Commits have been made to fix this, and I would recommend cherry picking these into a joist branch for the BASE 1.5 release.
phetsims/joist@ed6c7a6 and phetsims/joist@034eacb.

With these commits the "Audio" tab in the Preferences dialog won't be shown when the audio=disabled query parameter is used.

phetsims/joist#746 is still open to work on a longer term improvement but these two commits have been reviewed.

[arouinfar]

Thanks @jessegreenberg!

The current behavior in the 1.5 branch is buggy. Using audio=disabled should truly disable all audio in the sim. In phetsims/joist#746 we decided that the navbar icon and the Audio tab of the Preferences dialog should be hidden with audio=disabled. This behavior is currently in master and seems to be working well.

The longer-term improvement that @jessegreenberg referenced will still have the same behavior for the end-user, which is why I recommended cherry-picking the interim solution into the 1.5 branch.

[jbphet]

Thanks @arouinfar and @jessegreenberg. You're right, it's a much better solution to have the audio disappear from the "Preferences" menu when the audio=disabled parameter is used. I've moved these changes onto the 1.5 branch and will make sure this is tested in the next RC.

[Nancy-Salpepi]

Using MacBook Air (m1 chip) iOS 11.6 + safari 15:
With audio=disabled, I can still hear a sound with the first object I touch. The sound is much lower, but it is still there. Once that sound is produced, sound is disabled.
I didn't see this issue with Mac + chrome.

Here is an example with the reset button. You may need to turn your volume all the way up to hear it.

sound.mov

[jbphet]

I think I know what is causing the behavior that @Nancy-Salpepi describes above. I'm going to make an executive decision here and say that this is non-blocking to the 1.5 release of BASE, and that we should consider this issue fixed and file a separate common-code issue about the short sound when muted.

@Nancy-Salpepi - Can you please create a separate issue in the tambo repo that describes the problem from the previous comment and includes the video clip? Then, if there are no other problems related to audio=disabled, add a comment to that effect and assign this back to me.

[Nancy-Salpepi]

No additional issues seen with audio=disabled.

[jbphet]

Excellent, thanks. Closing.