Seriously, the amount of times this happened to me is astounding.
Pull up a YouTube video. Adjust the volume at the start. After playing for a while, I want to skip forward 5 seconds, so I press the right arrow. The video does not skip forward, so I press it again. I press it again, and in 4 seconds, I reach maxiumum volume.
Only at this point do I realize that, ah, this is part where YouTube interprets my right arrow as volume adjustment again, and I have to click on the play button or on the video itself to pause and play again, and only then will the right (and left) arrows mean what I think they mean.
I have never, ever - EVER wanted to use right arrow as volume up and left arrow as volume down for a YouTube video. not a single time in (almost) 20 years! And it does not even make sense from a usability standpoint, since the up and down arrows are already adjusting the volume up and down at all times, regardless of which part of the player is “active” (it should always be the play button. Fucking always).
The solution would be so simple, it hurts. Have the left and right arrows always mean 5 seconds backwards and forwards, as the up and down arrows already mean volume up and down. There is absolutely no need to switch the action of the left and right arrow, depending on if you clicked on the volume adjustment first. Oh well, chalk it up to “things I will never understand”.
There should be an accessibility option then. It shouldn’t be such a huge pain for everyone just so accessibility becomes the issue. Although up and down always working kinda destroys your whole point anyway.
Name me one situation where they need to use left and right instead of up/down.
This situation clearly doesn’t exist. OP is correct.
I don’t think I said that OP was wrong (in fact I’m pretty sure I agreed with OP that it was annoying as a fully abled user until I figured out what was going on), but to elaborate on my earlier point just slightly - once a horizontal slider element is in focus it will always use left and right arrow keys to move if they’re pressed. Up and down always works to change the volume because there are no other elements when the video player is selected that are waiting for an input.
If they made the volume slider vertical instead of horizontal it would end up working actually better in this case (because the vertical slider would instead wait for up and down arrows), although that probably wouldn’t look as “nice”, but I’m not a UX dev so it could probably be jazzed up to look nice.
I wasn’t disagreeing with either of you, just adding to the sentiment by suggesting another way to achieve it.