Change Focus Order of Player buttons?
Jan 20, 2022
As far as I can tell, you can't change the Focus Order of the Player buttons. However, it's pretty annoying for someone who is blind to have to hear about the volume button a couple of times, the the accessibility controls, and then the Previous button all before getting to the Next button.
Does anyone have any suggestions to make this better? I thought in previous versions it went to the Next button first, then the Previous button, then the rest of the player buttons. Is this possibly a bug? I'm using the latest version of Articulate 360.
One article I read mentioned the "skip navigation" button, but that takes you back to the top of the page. I don't want my learners to go to the top of the page (unless they want to), I want them to get the Next button first, and then the other player buttons in a reasonable order. Thanks!
4 Replies
I appreciate you reaching out and sharing your thoughts!
You're right; there isn't a way to change the focus order of the player navigation elements. I see you found additional info in this discussion, but I wanted to share this article that provides more insight into these changes.
Would you mind sharing your thoughts in the form of a feature request for our team to review? In the meantime, I'm looking forward to hearing what ideas our community members chime in with!
Thank you Becca. I see that the tab order has changed for the player as of April 2021. I can understand why it was done, although the logic only takes into account sighted people. When I put together a course, I know that some percentage of those who take the course are either visually impaired or completely blind, and I set the tab order to accommodate them rather than everyone else. Sighted people have many ways to interact with a course, but the blind do not.
There's no way to please everyone here. I wonder if it's technically possible to make the order of the player buttons adjustable by the e-learning developer? I'm sure this must have been considered already, and maybe it's too difficult/not possible. I just feel bad for my blind course participants who have to listen to the description of every button on every page. Given that not every page will have the same amount of buttons (the CC button only appears when there are closed captions) they can't even say "I tab three times at the end of each slide." We're making the experience significantly worse for them.
I will open a feature request and see what happens.
I also have this problem. Has it been solved in the past 2 years since kristin posted this questions?
If visually impaired attends my course I think they would want to tab to 'next' as quickly as possible. Not as now- have to tab to seekbar, volume etc before reaching next.
Hello Johanna,
We understand how important this is to your learners. Though I cannot even give an estimate on a timeline because of factors like complexity, breadth, and engineering's current workload, we can commit to keeping this post open so we can let you know if this feature is added. You will be among the first to know.
In the meantime, here's a peek into our process for managing feature requests.