audio control before slide content for accessibility
Nov 04, 2021
I have a course that is very close to passing its accessibility check, but all of my interactive slides have a problem, except one.
Accessibility guidelines require that the learner be able to reach the audio controls (mute/unmute and volume) within three tabs. Most of my interactive slides are requiring the user to tab through the content before getting to the audio controls. One of the offending slides uses built-in markers, and the rest have custom buttons with layers. The single interactive slide that meets this requirement (i.e., passes) is a convert-to-freeform multiple-choice question slide.
I've tried setting the layer settings on the offending button slides to match those of the question slide, but that didn't help. I can't figure out where to look in the published output for differences between the one good and all the bad slides.
Has anyone else had and solved this issue? Thanks in advance!
3 Replies
Hello Joanne!
I'm happy to help! Do you mind sharing which criterion requires the user to reach the audio controls within three tabs?
Tabbing through a Storyline course will go through each interactive element and then reach the Player items like the Play/Pause button, volume control, and the navigation buttons. I'm happy to take a look at your project to see what the difference might be! You can share the .story file in this discussion or upload it privately to me here.
I realize I am late to this discussion but I have been trying to research this issue online with little success. I have seen the "three tab" rule mentioned on some sites, but the W3C page only says the control should be "near" the top of the page or "early in the tab order" (see https://www.w3.org/TR/2016/NOTE-WCAG20-TECHS-20161007/G170) . So there is no real criterion for the number of tabs before reaching the pause button. Since it's common for the number of tabs to the player controls to vary, creating a button higher in the order for some slides and not for others would be maddening (and probably violate the consistent navigation standard). So what is the best practice? Is having the play/pause in the media controls enough to meet the SC, or it is better to add a button that is consistently at the top? Is there a solution that would allow most users to select autoplay from a starting slide that would override the button on individual slides? How are other people doing this?
Thanks!
Hi Chris,
I have not heard of the three-tab rule either, but we are discussing WCAG 1.4.2, which requires that any audio that plays automatically must have a way to pause or stop the audio.
A better practice would be not to have audio play automatically.
I shared a couple of examples in this conversation, and I look forward to hearing how others are handling this.