Hearing damage warning not intuitive

[Joe Liau]

When plugging in headphones the hearing damage notification pops up.
The options are "cancel" and "ok"

For me i feel like the results of pressing either option is reversed, even though it makes some sense when read carefully.

I.e. I expected "ok" to suppress the sound. And "cancel" to allow higher volume. I have the opposite case on the nexus 4.

The default should always be to protect the owner of the device.

Which means presenting the cenario "i will put your ears in danger, ok?“ is actually offering a harmful outcome rather than preventing it.

“I have supressed volume to protect you, ok?“ seems to make more sense to me.

However, reversing it now would present a moral dilemma since people are used to the way it currently acts.

[Matthew Paul Thomas (mpt)]

This is my fault. When I designed the loud volume handling, I considered only the cases where (1) you increase the volume, which produces the “Increase Volume” alert; or (2) you start or wake the device, which automatically reduces the volume. <https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Sound#limits>

I did not consider the case where you plug in headphones that have a loud remembered volume. Ideally an engineer or QA would have realized that “Increase Volume” doesn’t make sense in this case, but I guess they didn’t.

To handle this case, we could follow either of the same two approaches:
(1) put up an equivalent alert, with slightly different text and buttons (not just “OK”);
(2) automatically reduce the volume like we do on startup/wake.

I’m inclined to go with option (2), reducing the volume, because I don’t know what sensible wording would be for an alert. It would need to say something like, “Volume was loud last time you used these headphones. Restore previous volume? ( Reduce ) ( Restore )” But that seems unpleasantly bureaucratic.

[Joe Liau (joe)]

I agree with option (2). It would also be nice to receive a notification of what happened:
"Volume reduced to a safe level."

But, continuing the brainstorm here

I suppose we also have the cases of the device connecting to:
a) Bluetooth speakers/headset
b) Speakers via cable

Would those act similarly? For (b) I think the device cannot tell whether there are headphones or just an audio patch plugged in. This might be a possible alert for option (1):
"Audio cable detected: (Headphones) (Other)" / "Are you using headphones? (YES) (NO)"

Choosing "headphones"/"YES" would reduce the audio, while the "other"/"NO" would not.

[Joe Liau (joe)]

I noticed that the safety warning only appears if headphones are plugged in while audio is currently playing.

i.e. if you pause the audio (e.g. music) turn volume to full, plug in the headphones, then press play, there is no dialogue and the volume remains high and potentially "harmful".