The negative effects of animated GIFs in MuseScore's Handbook

The presence of animated GIFs in MuseScore's documentation has increased dramatically in recent months. Indeed some of the GIFS are quite useful, but on certain pages the abundance of autoplay, forever looping animated GIFs has reached the point of distraction.

Pros of animated GIFs:

     • A picture is worth 1000 words

     • GIFs have a lighter storage footprint than videos

Cons of animated GIFs

     • thee or four GIFs playing per page = annoying distraction

     • even just one or two hyperactive GIFs = serious distraction

     • GIFs loop endlessly by default — I think most (all?) GIFs have an autoplay property. If so, distraction could be greatly reduced with autoplay = OFF. Alternately perhaps there’s loop Once parameter that stops the GIF after one iteration and displays a Play button.

     • currently in the MuseScore 4 Handbook we can’t pause or rewind most GIFs, so there’s no easy way to halt playback at particular point to examine a notational example, a menu, palette, dialog ... it all just wizzes by. Deeper scrutiny is inherently disallowed.

     • it's difficult to know if you're at the beginning, middle or end of the animation because there's no progress bar. Sometimes it's hard to know if a looping GIF is continuing with a depiction of a new and similar topic … or if it’s started over.

Recommendations

     • have GIFs appear like most videos do. Paused at the start with a visible internal play button, as shown in the attached GIF.

     • have GIFs play once and stop … with the option to restart

     • if the previous suggestions are not possible, then require that those submitting GIFs signify end of “recording” with a fade to black … or add one or two seconds of black screen at the end. Anything to prevent users from watching the loop three or four times before they realize. Editing GIFs is not necessarily simple, but I'd hope appending "fade to black" would be rather straight forward.

     • No option for sound or voice over

I’ll go out on a limb here with a couple of probably points:

1) Whether correct or not, let's make the assumptions that musicians are generally sensitive people, and that sensitive people are easily distracted.

2) Animated GIFs are distracting—otherwise advertisers wouldn't rely on them so heavily. And I think everyone knows this is true. The more MuseScore documentation includes autoplay animated GIFs the more difficult it will be to remain focused when reading the documentation.

3) Think of loop Once as an accessibility issue. There are certainly some of us who can't concentrate when sufficient animation plays continuously in the Handbook.

4) as an experiment:
      • open a second browser page of this post
      • start the animated GIF (attached below)
      • position the looping GIF as close to the first browser page as possible
      • try rereading this article (in the first browser page)