Accessibility: Headings in Storyline 360

SOLUTION

Thanks to Articulate Support for troubleshooting and identifying a solution. It appears that custom alt text was causing the issue. Here's what Articulate suggested:

We further dig into the issue and found out that the issue is caused by a combination of custom alt text, text styles in your text box.

 I’ve logged it as a possible software bug.

 As a workaround, you can try to remove the custom alt-text to your text box (headings) and leave it to its default alt-text

FYI and thank you Articulate Support!

Upon further testing, I discovered that creating and publishing a brand new project works as expected with screen reader testing. Headings are read out.

I created a sample page with an H1 and an H2, each with supporting text. All headings, including the Course Title (top bar region H1) slide titles and sub-titles (main landmark H1 and H2) are announced and the headings are listed in the Elements List window.

Here's a video of my experience testing this new project.

This is interesting, as it demonstrates that creating a brand new project using the latest Storyline update generates the proper semantic structure (at least with headings), but republishing a course built with any previous Storyline versions (marked up with headings) does not seem to have the same result.

Articulate staff- would love some feedback as to why this might be happening. 

Thank you!

Would it make sense to change the H1 heading on the slide to H2? 

I *think* what you're seeing is by design. For accessibility purposes, the course title is perceived as the sole H1 tag by the screen reader. It persists across all slides. (I'll be happy to be corrected on this by the Articulate team -- just thinking out loud here.)

So, it may just be a matter of assigning H2 to the top-level text on each slide (and restyling the H2 formatting to suit your design). Does that make sense with the user experience you have in mind?

That does make some sense but then why even have the Heading 1 option in the list?

Yes, I have done little else for the last 24 hours. I am struggling with a number of issues that I have raised on a separate discussion. 

Thank you for your comments, everyone, I appreciate them.

Here are my thoughts:

1. I did not assume H1 would be automatically applied to Course Title, which is why I used H1 on each of the individual slides (which I consider to be separate pages) - Liz and Matthew - I agree with your thoughts on there only being one H1 on a page 
2. I did assume based on the most recent update that all headings on individual slides would be read out, even if multiple H1s were assigned, they should all be identified in the Elements List and announced by the screen reader

Here is another slide example from the course. This slide has two headings, an H1 and an H2, neither is being recognized by NVDA, only the Course Title is. The Elements List windows in NVDA only show the Course Title H1 - the headings on my page are clearly not identified as styled headings. 

I think there is a problem with published output here. The semantic markup of individual slides is missing, at least the heading structure is.

I have not tested this with Jaws yet. 

I submitted a support ticket to troubleshoot this behaviour. I look forward to hearing back from Articulate. 

I haven't had any problems with JAWS and headings. It is reading them as I would expect. Also quite exciting - it is reading bullet point lists correctly, with the exception that if you format the bullets to use a different symbol, e.g. a tick, it ceases to recognise the bullets.

I just tested with Jaws and it's announcing "there are no headings on this page" when it focuses on the slide. It reads out Course Title as H1. 

Hi 

I am getting similar problems when testing with NVDA - it does not recognise the heading styles (H1, H2 etc) on the majority of the my slides - I have tried renaming the project and republishing but that has not made any difference for me. I also tried converting text boxes to objects as thought that might be the reason but still the screen reader doesn't recognise the headings or the bullets no matter what I use.

Thanks Lauren - issue was fixed today - I ended up raising a ticket with Articulate support - the alt text in the accessibility options for text boxes must be 'greyed out'  and not overwritten in order for the styles to work properly and the H1 etc to be recognised.