Forum Discussion
IMPORTANT! - a fix if you have a PLAY button appearing at start of courses
OK, Articulate rolled out an update to Storyline and it seems that now when publishing a course, instead of auto-playing (as before) it now puts a nasty big PLAY button on the first screen.
Hopefully Articulate will roll out a fix (very!) soon.
In the meantime, I have discovered that AUDIO on the opening slide will cause this. Removing the audio, removed the PLAY button and things went back to normal.
Therefore to get round the issue, try what I did - create a tiny opening slide of a flat colour (same as your project background) and set it to be your opening slide.
Worked well for me, and thankfully I can now stop hearing screaming from my clients.
To get around this for now, I created a plain starting slide and set a trigger to jump to next slide when timeline ends on slide 1.1. The timeline is less than 1 second so the slide isn't even seen. Doing this removed the play button and gray overlay when published. :)
I don't understand why ends users always have to apply some sort of work around when an update is not well tested. I loaded three courses before the latest 360 update with Chrome 66 and they are deployed as designed. The last two courses I upload to our LMS with the latest 360 update, are giving me the "PLAY" button. What I am saying is, if it was a Chrome issue, then why are my first three course work without the play button? All of the course has an audio file on the first slide.
I understand why this was added, but that play button looks pretty bad. The triangle could at least be centered on the button.
It's worth noting that the play button is not showing keyboard focus, is not detected by JAWS and does not appear responsive to any keyboard commands I've tried, so it essentially renders projects inaccessible.
Hi Douglas,
Thanks for bringing this up here! It's something I also reported to our team, and we're looking into this right now. While we look into this, one option is to create your own first slide with a play button that is accessible, as Chrome is looking for the user interaction to indicate that they would want media to autoplay.
I'll keep you posted here as soon as I have any other info to share.
In my experience, adding a blank slide doesn't 100% solve the problem... because I find that Chrome (or also Firefox) needs an action (e.g. a click) before the audio can start, so if I put the slide with a duration of 0.25 and then a transition "when timeline ends" to the "real" starting slide, it stays stuck until I click or do something... or am I doing something wrong here?
Hi Andrew,
I wanted to connect this to your other discussion here. I believe the play button you're seeing is based on the latest update to Chrome 66 to block autoplay of media. Storyline 360 was updated to support that.
What about SL3?
Hi Ashley,
I have the latest update applied to Storyline 2, however the play button does not appear on slide 1 (which has audio) so my audio does not play. This is when publishing to Web, the box for "Included HTML5 Output" is checked. Any idea what may be causing this? Thank you!
Storyline and Studio: Videos Don't Autoplay in Google Chrome 66 and Later
Article Last Updated May 3, 2018This article applies to:
Storyline 360, Storyline 3, Storyline 2, Studio 360, Studio ’13
As a result, videos that have audio might not autoplay in Chrome 66 and later. Here's what to do, depending on your version of Storyline or Studio.Storyline 360 and Studio 360
Storyline 3, Storyline 2, and Studio '13
Storyline 360 and Studio 360
We added a workaround for Chrome's new behavior to Storyline 360 and Studio 360 in the update released December 12, 2017. Just install the latest software update and republish your course.My version of Articulate 360 is updated. I republished my files but they are still showing the gray overlay and big play button.
and yet, every time I go to CNET to read an article, they seem to have found a way to get around this!
Funny, I literally thought about this today on a CNET video that autoplayed audio and video with no prompt or user decision. Clearly the rules on this are bendable in some way - I'm guessing it might have something to do with those browsers' media indexing.
So what this also means is that any Storyline course we have already published and posted online has to conform to this (by any non-conforming slides being edited, and then the entire thing republished and reposted/replaced) or it stops working correctly.
I just want to be sure I understand. The only way to have my audio play on my second slide when using the "add a slide that runs for .25 seconds" fix is by having the user do something on that specific page.
I'm basing this on Ashley's comment in the thread "you'll need to have some user initiation on the first slide to allow the audio to play. This is browser and domain-specific as if the user has previously allowed audio to play on that site (i.e. pressed play, unmuted it, etc.) Chrome is keeping track of that and using it to determine how it should behave in the future."
We have several courses that were published that had this issue. We used the "add a slide" fix and it worked. Now we are updating and while we don't see the play button, the audio is no longer automatically starting. We are also experiencing the Play button showing on any engage interactions we have imported into Storyline.
Are these two things related? Has anyone figured a fix for this? Any help is greatly appreciated!!
