Screen readers: focus order with buttons and layers, and change state of buttons

May 24, 2023

Hi All,

This post relates to an accessibility issue that was reported to Articulate Storyline to do with focus order and screen readers in 2019.

With a module I am developing I have a slide with 6 buttons. When a button is selected a layer appears related to that button. For the screen reader user there is the issue that the focus order does not change to the associated layer after the button is selected meaning the screen reader cannot access the layer content as expected. There is also the other accessibility issue that the change state of the button , i.e. from the initial state of 'normal' to 'visited' is not accessible to the SR meaning the SR user does not have an accurate way of knowing what content they have visited or not. The latter issue is reported here. This latter issue has been reported here 2017 and here again in 2023.

Is there any functionality available within Articulate Storyline that I may have overlooked to get this information accessible to screen reader users?

Regards,

Martin

4 Replies

Jose Tansengco
Staff

11 months ago05/24/23 at 2:33 pm (UTC)

Hi Martin,

I'm sorry to hear that you ran into this issue. We are currently tracking a known bug where the visited state of buttons or shapes is announced/read intermittently by JAWS or NVDA and it looks like you are being affected. I've added this post to the bug report so we can notify you as soon as a fix is released.

If you'd like to share a copy of your project file here or in private by opening a case with our support team, we'll be glad to check if there are any viable workarounds that we can share with you.

Admin IC
Author

11 months ago05/24/23 at 11:18 pm (UTC)

Hi Joe, thanks for the offer of looking into this. Please see the attached file. I have not worked on slide 4 so please disregard it. The issue relates to slide 1 and 3. Looking forward to hearing back from you.

COI_for_Articulate_Support.story

11 months ago05/25/23 at 4:23 pm (UTC)

Hi Martin,

Thanks for sharing a copy of your project file.

I can confirm that I was able to observe both behaviors.

When opening a new layer using a screen reader, the new layer does not get announced. However, if I press the down key, the next item that gets read is the title of the layer. And pressing down a few more times takes me to the text in the body of the layer. This behavior is expected, and is discussed in this document.

A workaround here would be to present your layers as 'dialogues' rather than 'layers' so they can be announced by screen readers.
The visited states do not get recognized after a tab back to a button that I had already pressed. This behavior appears to be inline with the bug that I mentioned, and it looks like swapping out the button for a shape or image file doesn't help to address the behavior.

I've added this ELH post so we can notify you as soon as a fix for the 'Visited states' issue is released.

Admin IC
Author

11 months ago05/29/23 at 12:19 am (UTC)

Hi Joe,

Thank you for the reply.

The suggestion of pressing the down key to read the title of the layer and the text didn’t work using NVDA. I do question whether the recommendation of using the down arrow is the best way forward (even if it did work) as a screen reader user would naturally expect at least the title of the layer to be announced after pressing the button that activated it – how likely is it they will then use the down arrow when they do not hear the title or other text being announce? In the absence of a solution I will instead use the workaround you mention.

Regarding the visited state not getting recognised by the screen reader– please note that this is occurring consistently, not intermittently. Correct me if I am wrong but I understand this bug has been known since 2017 – looking forward to a fix.

Regards,

Martin