Immediate play sound on button click in HTML page

If you only need to support recent browsers, then HTML 5 offers you the Audio object

to load/buffer your sound:

var snd = new Audio("file.wav");

to play the sound:

snd.play();

to re-cue it to the beginning (so that you can play it again):

snd.currentTime=0;

This answer https://stackoverflow.com/a/7620930/1459653 by @klaustopher (https://stackoverflow.com/users/767272/klaustopher) helped me. He wrote:

HTML5 has the new <audio>-Tag that can be used to play sound. It even has a pretty simple JavaScript Interface:

<audio id="sound1" src="yoursound.mp3" preload="auto"></audio> <button onclick="document.getElementById('sound1').play();">Play it</button>

Here's how I implemented his advice so that clicking on the Font Awesome icon "fa-volume-up" (located on the Web page after "mule.") results in "donkey2.mp3" sound playing (note: mp3 doesn't play in all browsers).

<p>In short, you're treated like a whole person, instead of a rented mule. <audio id="sound1" src="assets/donkey2.mp3" preload="auto"></audio><a class="icon fa-volume-up" onclick="document.getElementById('sound1').play();"></a>