screen readers and screencasts
Mar 24, 2022
Hi - I'm trying to improve the accessibility of a short screencast done with Storyline 360. A screen reader by default reads slide titles and everything I've entered into text boxes during the screencast, including my personal user ID and password, which I'm obviously not wanting to share! So I've blurred the visuals, but the screen reader is still reading it out loud. :) I'm not sure how to fine-tune which elements are read and, hopefully, fine-tune the text that is read. For some reason, the text boxes I've added are not being read at all. I've clicked on the "Accessibility" option and it says they should be visible to accessibility tools. So some things I thought would be read are not, but the bigger issue is how to edit the things that are being read. Thanks for any help! -Beth
3 Replies
HI Beth,
You can click on the "Focus Order" button in Storyline so that you can remove objects that you do not need to be read by the screen reader. You can also customize the accessible text from this menu as well!
Thanks for the suggestion, John! I had removed everything from the focus order except the text boxes but they are still not being read. I ended up renaming my slides, which took care of the issue of it reading out my password, at least. Now I'm just renaming all the slides with the text that is in the text boxes. Since the slide name was the only thing that was being reliably read, this was the best work-around I could find. I'm using the NVDA screen reader. And I did my screencast in Chrome, which I'm now reading could be part of the problem. But I did a quickie version using Edge and it really wasn't any better.
Hello Beth!
Thanks for following up! Another thought, which keys are you using to move through the slide? I ask, because text boxes can be navigated to using the down arrow instead of using the standard "Tab" key. Are the text boxes read when using the down arrow to move through the Focus Order?