Help us improve Storyline 360 & Accessibility
Apr 10, 2024
Hi, E-Learning Heroes community members!
I'm Ronnie Pilman, Senior QA Engineer and Accessibility Lead for Storyline 360 at Articulate, here to give you an update on accessibility—and ask you for a favor.
Let’s start with the update and a refresher on our goals. Our mission is to move accessibility in Storyline 360 beyond Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) standards. We want all learners—regardless of ability—to be able to navigate Storyline 360 content effectively with any web browser, device, or assistive technology. And we want to make creating accessible courses easier for authors.
To do that, we are continually improving our products to address accessibility issues and make enhancements. Most recently, we added customization options for closed captions to ensure they’re easy to see and don’t obstruct critical content. We also made all the modern player controls compliant with the latest WCAG 2.2 guidance and fixed a bug that was preventing learners from using the ESC key to close player tabs and the accessibility settings menu. (Dive into the complete list of enhancements and fixes for all the details.)
That leads us to the ask. As we plan for future Storyline 360 improvements, we need your feedback to help guide our next steps. What areas of accessibility do you think require the most attention? How can we serve you and your learners better? To let us know, please complete this short survey: https://research.articulate.com/storylinea11y.
The survey will be open until May 7, 2024. We’d love to hear from you before then.
Thanks,
Ronnie Pilman (He/Him/His)
Senior QA Engineer II
5 Replies
Really exciting to see this accessibility work keep pushing!
Looking forward to the outcomes from this survey. I think SL has come a long way in recent years, but still quite a long way behind what is possible hand coding. I'd love to be able to get to the stage of testing SL content, and not having to give allowances as the content is built in SL360. I'd like to be as tough on SL360 content as I am on hand coded content.
I think some major enhancements could be providing the ability group elements into containers that could then have aria attributes added such as aria-live.
Being able to programmatically change the screen reader focus would be a big leap for developers and provide the ability to provide a good end user experience when reading the content with a screen reader.
Please for the love of all thats good and holy.... overhaul the hideous Focus Order controls. I shudder every time I know I will have to use them, they are so antiquated and quarrelsome!
And as Sam already says, adding the ability to change this via code/triggers would be huge.
Thanks!
Actually, I don't mind the Focus Order controls so much. The positive is that once you set the focus order, you know for certain how the slides are read with a screen reader. My biggest complaint about it is the inability to select multiple lines (using the shift and ctrl keys) and move them more easily. I have also noticed some inconsistency with image alt tags sometime showing in the Focus Order list and sometimes they don't.
One thing I know that videos in Storyline are in violation for is the lack of audio descriptions.
Storyline's closed captioning editor is one of the best I've ever seen. One thing that would infinitely helpful would be the ability to select a range of captions and move them all. Say for instance, you edit the audio in the video to add or remove a phrase, and now you must move several minutes of captions a few seconds one way or the other - quite painful as it stands now.