Keyboard navigation and hyperlinks

Aug 22, 2014

Afternoon!

I'm writing a course on Disability Awareness, and by definition I need to ensure that the course is accessible as possible.

I've got a page with a number of links out to external websites. Each link is contained in its own text box (to allow the screen reader to work properly).

When using a mouse to navigate, it works fine. But, if I use the keyboard and try to open a highlighted link either by hitting SPACE or RETURN, all of the links on the page are opened at the same time, rather than the single one that's selected.

Any idea why this is happening and what I can do to stop it from happening?

FYI - I'm using IE8 and the latest version of Chrome and it happens in both browsers.

Thanks

6 Replies

Justin Grenier
Staff

over 9 years ago08/22/14 at 9:36 am (UTC)

Good Afternoon Glenn, and welcome to Heroes!

Would you mind please sharing a copy of your .story project file so that we can take a closer look at the behavior you are describing? Thanks!

Glenn Jones
Author

over 9 years ago08/26/14 at 2:41 am (UTC)

Hi Justin

Thanks for coming back to me, and linking the duplicates

I've since had an email from Jonathan Reque via the support email address and it turns out it's because I've got Space Bar set up as the trigger for all of the links that appear on the page.

He has suggested assigning different keys to each of the links that show up on the page.

Whilst I'm sure that'd work, it's far from an ideal solution. My understanding is that most keyboard users would be accustomed to tabbing to a link on a web page and then hitting space bar (or Return/Enter) to open that link. This is the behaviour I was expecting/hoping to have replicated within Storyline.

I've attached a single page story file (as the full project is quite large), but it demonstrates the issue I'm having quite nicely.

Is there any way of making the keyboard navigation behave in the way I was expecting it to, or do I have to resort to the workaround that Jonathan has suggested?

Thanks

hyperlinks+not+working+properly.story

Douglas Spencer

over 9 years ago08/26/14 at 5:33 am (UTC)

I would add a condition to the Jump to URL/File link that would check to see if the text box was selected. That way, only the selected text box would execute.

Justin Grenier
Staff

over 9 years ago08/26/14 at 5:43 am (UTC)

Good Morning, Glenn.

When tabbing among buttons on a slide, the spacebar is the default action key, so no additional triggers are needed. It doesn't appear that text boxes behave quite the same way, but here's a quick example (underlying .story project file here) of a slide containing buttons (that look like text boxes) which seems to work as desired.

Please let us know if you need anything else, and good luck with your project!