Forum Discussion
New in Storyline 360: Text Autofit Enhancements
We know how important it is for all learners to easily access and read the text in your courses, which is why we’re excited about the improvements we’ve made to the text-authoring experience in Storyline 360. With the text autofit improvements we’ve just released, you have new ways to manage text elements, more control over your text, and easier ways to make your text accessible. Here’s a quick summary of these improvements.
Greater control over text
Three new text autofit options help you preserve your preferred font size and prevent text from automatically shrinking. Now you can choose from “expand width,” “expand height,” and “fixed size” options. Read more about each of these autofit options and see the difference between the old and new approaches in this article.
More precision over the size of your text box
Before, when you tried to resize a text box to your preferred size, it would automatically default to the height of the first line of text. With the new text autofit enhancements, you can now easily set the precise size of your text box regardless of the amount of text.
Having more precision also means you have a more accurate view of how your text will appear in the published output.
Faster workflow for a smoother experience
Now, with a single click, you can quickly toggle between different autofit options to accomplish more in less time.
Improved readability across browsers
Since accessible text is HTML text, it can display differently across browsers. With text autofit improvements, now you can easily adjust the text elements and remove scroll bars before learners see them.
We hope you’ll love the enhanced authoring speed and flexibility and greater control that comes with these new text autofit improvements. To learn even more, check out Storyline 360: Text Autofit Improvements and Accessible Text Features in Storyline 360.
This is proving to be a disastrous time waster. When I create quiz questions, every single "Correct" or "Incorrect" slide has scroll bars for both the "Correct"/"Incorrect" text field and the "Continue" button. I am having to manually adjust every single layer slide, either by dragging the handles or downsizing the text. Opening the Properties window to adjust settings doesn't help.
I can't roll back without losing significant work now. Please give us an ETA on the fix for this bug.
Hi, Julia: Just noticed the same issue, but you beat me to it. I'll be watching this thread for updates.
Agree with the other Julia 1000000%. Huge time waster and I am glad to hear that we will be able to switch this "feature" off.
We have rolled back to the April 27 version and plan to stay here indefinitely. Kathryn's screenshot made our entire team's blood run cold. Would much rather have seen these resources applied to providing the Morph transition than solving a "problem" we didn't know we had.
Hi everyone,
We wanted to update you on what we’re doing to address your concerns about recent text autofit enhancements.
While text autofit delivers necessary enhancements that ensure all learners can access and read the text in your courses, we’ve heard from many of you that it has negatively impacted your authoring experience in Storyline 360. When a project is upgraded to use text autofit enhancements, unexpected scroll bars sometimes appear. These scroll bars are due to text areas having extra lines, text, or other elements that overflow the bounds or margins of the shape. They always existed but are now made obvious by the scrollbars. We realize that making these autofit enhancements active by default has resulted in extra work for some of you, and we’re sorry for the inconvenience and frustration we’ve caused.
There’s work underway to refine the feature, and we’ve recently released an update that increases the default widescreen slide size to 960 x 540, giving you more space to work with and alleviating some of the unexpected scroll bars. In the coming weeks, we’ll also release an update that temporarily disables the default autofit feature while we make more improvements.
Our accessibility work is a journey, and we’re bound to face a few uphill climbs and detours. Thank you for being our partner on this journey. We’re grateful to have your feedback to learn and grow from.
Simon Taghioff
Product Manager, Articulate 360Thank you! Happy to see that I will be able to disable this. It truly is causing a huge amount of wasted time. I appreciate you and the team working on this.
Hi everyone,
We just released another update for Articulate 360, and thanks to your feedback, Text Autofit Improvements are no longer enabled by default.
This means, starting with this update, all new and existing projects that haven’t upgraded project text will remain with the legacy settings. If you have a project with text autofit enabled, you can update Storyline 360, then import the slides into a new project as they will not have the text autofit settings enabled.
Then, when you're ready, you can upgrade project text at any time to make the text more accessible to all learners. You can read more about this and all the new features and fixes below!
Hi Ren, a few months ago, you made this comment:
"Remove extra margin space in the text within shapes: Extra margin space can cause text to overflow the bounds of the shape. Remove that extra margin space by right-clicking on the shape and formatting the Text Box to remove unnecessary margins."
The extra margin space is a default that SL assigns to all text containers, so removing it is an added step for SL users. I can understand the need for a default text margin greater than zero for shapes and buttons, which default to visible boundaries. I don't advocate for making the default zero for those elements, but I'm not sure why a text margin greater than zero is necessary for text boxes, which have invisible boundaries. A margin causes text to be visually misaligned to other objects because the alignment is to the invisible boundary instead of the text itself. This forces SL users to take extra steps to remove unnecessary margins or live with imperfect alignment. I'd like to see Articulate make the default margins zero for new (invisible) text boxes.
I will note, however, that for objects with visible boundaries like shapes and buttons, the text margins are needed. The only way to avoid the scroll bars with accessible text, then, is to set autofit to Expand Height and use the margins to achieve the shape/button height and text centering that the user wants.
However, at the end of the day, there are still potential issues with accessible text and learners who need to zoom-in to read content. The crux of the problem is that Storyline slides have fixed dimensions and are fundamentally more akin to PowerPoint slides than web pages. When a user zooms in on a web page, it expands and adds vertical scroll bars to the entire page. A properly programmed web page rearranges the content to reflow at zoom levels up to 200% (WCAG's standard) so that horizontal scrolling is limited or non-existent, and vertical scrolling becomes necessary. By comparison, any attempt to expand the size of text and other content on a slide that does not, itself, expand or adjust accordingly will cause issues. I'm not saying that Storyline slides should become like web pages--if SL users want that, they should probably start using Rise (assuming it's fully accessible), which was designed for that kind of output. I'm just describing the limitation inherent in a tool that designs and outputs PowerPoint-like slides with fixed dimensions. I know Articulate feels strongly that accessible text is necessary for WCAG compliance, but in my opinion, this might not be achievable for Storyline output and, honestly, I'm not certain it's necessary for WCAG compliance when Storyline slides are intended to resemble PowerPoint slides and not web pages. An accessibility consultant would be best able to answer this.
In the meantime, SL users can strive to make their written content easier to read for low-vision users by ensuring font size aligns with the best practices for PowerPoint slides (e.g, depending on color contrast such as black text on white, many recommend 14 point or larger for bold text, or 18 points or larger for regular text). These are just a handful of sources on accessibility for PPT slides from Microsoft, HHS.gov, section508.gov.
Just my two cents, for what it's worth...
Thanks,
Lisa
OK guys, THIS is not an improvement. THIS is a nightmare that has now derailed our entire teams' projects. If you guys haven't updated your Articulates yet, DONT do it until this feature is removed. Why would the default be to add a scrollbar? If I wanted so much text on the slide that I needed a scrollbar to go through it, I'd just insert my text box into a scrolling panel. This makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. There are a million annoying problems you could be focusing your energy and talents fixing, and instead you have changed the default setting to something that we need only once in a blue moon? i'm sorry but whoever came up with this idea should be fired.
Totally agree - if I want a scrolling panel I'll add it! So glad I haven't updated yet. I had a feeling there would be more issues. :(
Here's the other part of the problem...if you revert to previous version and you have done any substantial amount of work in 52, you won't be able to open it in 51. So you either print an outline by publishing to word and recreate it manually, or live with the bug in 52 until there's a fix. I'm living with the bug.
Thanks for the info. Reverting to the previous version did not work for me either.
I've been having the *exact same issues Scott. Super frustrating. I tried reverting back too, but then was not able to open the file I had started with the "new version".
I couldn't find a way to navigate to technical support to submit a case on line, by email, or chat.
A Storyline source file only appears to be tagged as using Text Scrollbars (thus breaking compatibility) if it is either created in v3.52 as a new file or the file is 'upgraded' using the new button in Format Shape | Text Box.
So I'd suggest a viable workaround for now for anyone concerned with retaining compatibility would be to create a basic blank file using v3.51 or earlier, save it and then use a copy of that file as the basis for new projects. I've tried importing a PPT into such a file using v3.52 - the new auto-fit buttons do not appear and once saved the file still opens in earlier SL versions.
In practice I almost never begin a new project from scratch anyway and prefer to clone older projects as a starting point to avoid having to spend hours recreating complex functionality, so hopefully this issue, though annoying, will not actually impact my work too much.
Has this issue been resolved yet? I'm having the same issue where I can't open in a previous version. I used to use the 'Use Modern Text' feature to fix all my kerning issues when using Arial, but that went away and I started using Display Accessible Text by Default -- sure wish there was an undo for that. I can't rollback to an older version due to the issue mentioned above Jeremy :( I personally do not ever want scrollbars in my text boxes unless I put them there.
Ren, can we get an update on a fix for this? We are roughly 45 days into the problem.
You indicated that your team is working on this issue. ARE you working on an option for us to turn off the Text Autofit feature? Right now, my team is holding at the April 27 update with no intention of moving forward until your team indicates that this "enhancement" either adapts 100% to the text boxes we create, without manual checking every box for any extra margin or line issues, or we have the option to just turn it off.
In our case, we've found no extra lines or margin problems. As Kathryn Farrelly's screen shot above shows, the scroll bars are very short...just indicating that the bottoms of the text boxes are being cut off and not that an entire second line of blank text is the culprit. This is our issue. EVERY SINGLE TEXT BOX....even the ones generated by Storyline in quiz layers...has a short scroll bar.
Please give us the option to just turn this off. Then everyone can move forward.
Julia Mays
Talent Systems, Orlando Health
