Button states not reporting to screen reader users
Jul 24, 2019
An important WCAG 2.0 A guideline is 4.1.2 "For all user interface components (including but not limited to: form elements, links and components generated by scripts), the name and role can be programmatically determined; states, properties, and values that can be set by the user can be programmatically set; and notification of changes to these items is available to user agents, including assistive technologies. "
Articualte treats this as "author controlled", though it is not controllable by the author, for buttons at least. Though I believe states should be automatically reported to screen-reader (SR) technology by SL, the alternative text settings for each state are not reported to the SR either. Please see the attached video and SL project as examples of the issue. Fails in both JAWS 18 and current release of NVDA. Please note, the SL project includes several other a11y mitigation solutions to help SR users. (I was unable to post this as a software bug, so this forum is my next best option. )
4 Replies
Hi David,
Our team is actually looking into a similar situation where the normal state of a button is all that's read out by a screen reader tool such as JAWS even when alt text has been added to the Selected/Visited state.
We'll keep you posted here on any updates for this bug!
Hi David,
I have good news!
I am happy to share that we just released the newest version of Storyline 360 Build 3.37.21453.0, which fixed the issue where only the normal state of a button was read by a screen reader tool.
The next step is to update Storyline 360 by heading to your Articulate 360 desktop app and clicking "Update" next to Storyline 360.
As always, we are happy to answer any questions you have by posting in this discussion, or you can contact our Support Engineers directly.
Help! JAWS has always read the states and now, all of a sudden I can't get JAWS 19 or 20 to read the states in SL360 or SL3 Version 11:3.11.23355.0. Please advise. We review projects in HTML5 using the Edge Browser.
Hi Erin,
Thanks for reaching out and sharing what you are experiencing.
I was able to publish your presentation using Storyline 360 Build 3.50.24668.0 and the content works as expected in:
We do recommend using the latest version of JAWS as you can see in our system requirements here.
Please note: I did update the color on both the selected and visited state for your second button so that I could see and hear what was or was not happening on the slide.
Here's my published link (it will expire in 10 days).