audio playback control across successive pages

I'm creating a web-based tutorial and I want to add audio. Specifically, I want
to allow the learners to select "Audio ON" from any page, and hear key text on
that page read aloud. Then when they go to the next page, (either Next/Previous
or via hyperlink/branching), I want the audio to automatically play for that
page.

Does this make sense? I don't want them to have to click PLAY everytime they
arrive at a page. If Audio is ON, I want it to stay on. If they select Audio
OFF, I want them to progress through the pages in silence.

But on each page, I want them to be able to make the global choice.

Any suggestions?

I would use a session variable or a persistent querystring variable. Are you
using a server technology? if so which one?

In asp you can set and read a session variable very easily. Session variables
persist across a viewers visit in the domain. You can also set a length of time
for the session. I hope this answer helps.

No, we don't use server technology. My company simply puts these tutorials on
the network, and then calls them from the intranet.

Does this simple approach make it harder? I'm an intermediate HTML guy, no
more.

It doesn't necessarily make it harder... just more time consuming. For instance
lets say that you have two versions of every tutorial page. One has sound on...
the other is sound off. When you click on the sound on link it takes you to the
sound page. All sounds pages link to sound on pages. Clicking the sound off
link takes you to the sound off version of the page which contains links to
only soundless pages. This is a bigger file management issue then I personally
want to deal with.

On an almost similar note I might encourage you and anyone interested in doing
tutorials to look at Macromedia Captivate. We use it for all of our training
material and we have had a tremendous response. Very nice, clean and fairly
flexible.

Good luck.