Issue with Accessibility Tabbing, 16:9 format, and resizing the browser to fill the screen

Jun 12, 2019

So I recently spent many hours with Articulate's support staff in trying to identify why the yellow highlight box would display in published Storyline 3 files sometimes but not always. It seems that there are several reasons that prevent the yellow box from being displayed for all tab items listed in the tab order box. The yellow tab boxes are not always displayed and/or are not displayed in the order you list them in the tab order box, and/or are not displayed in the correct order until you tab through them a second time, and/or are not always displayed for layers, when:

- You use a 16:9 slide size format

- You choose to resize the player to fill the browser window 

It is very frustrating to get through with an entire project and then have the tabbing highlights behave erratically and in an unpredictable way.

In addition, there should be SOMETHING you can do to provide visual confirmation when the system is skipping the display of a tab highlight rectangle in anticipation of JAWS asking if you would like to skip the player controls. NOT EVERYONE USES KEYBOARD TABBING FOR A SCREEN READER! Plenty of people have to use the keyboard tab key to navigate because they cannot use a mouse and must use another assistive device for which the tab key becomes a substitute for the mouse click. For these individuals, it is important to have some visual indication of what they have tabbed to because they are NOT listening to a screen reader. These so-called "dead tabs" (tabbing with no visual indication of what is activated) can be very confusing to a learner. In fact, people choose to tab through eLearning lessons for a variety of reasons, many of which have nothing to do with a screen reader.  

I have just discovered ANOTHER issue with the tabbing. Having decided to use a 4:3 format and avoid resizing the player to fill the browser, I thought I should have no issues with tabbing. However, in my latest, ONE SCREEN program, the buttons I created do not highlight in the order I have set in the tab order screen AND once visited, the buttons are not highlighted with a yellow rectangle again so that I know when to hit Enter so I can revisit them. 

This is very frustrating. Articulate needs to do a much better job of accessibility testing if they CLAIM to have an accessible product!!

M Larson

4 Replies
Leslie McKerchie

Hi Miriam,

So sorry to hear that you've run into another issue. We are hard at work on improving accessibility and understanding the needs of our customers is important as well.

Are you running into the tab order issue while on a slide layer or on the base layer?

With your permission, I'd like to take a look at your project file to investigate what's happening. You can share it publicly here, or send it to me privately by uploading it here. I'll delete it when I'm done troubleshooting.

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