Seeking feedback: Accessibility and videos in Storyline 360
Jul 28, 2017
Here's my dilemma:
A few years back we started using external video services because of Storyline's lack of captioning. This ended up working really well for the following reasons:
- Reduces the load on the LMS by serving videos from a CDN
- No need to republish the course when a video needs to change
- Captioning worked
- Adjusts video quality to suit user's bandwidth
Unfortunately, I knew that this wasn't a good experience for visually-impaired learners as screen readers couldn't "tab into" the videos to control the video. With the revision of the 508 standards and the subsequent adherence to WCAG, we now risk failing sections of the VPAT because of the lack of keyboard controls to the videos.
So, now we're looking at re-embedding all the videos. This technically works because Storyline now includes captioning, but we're losing the benefits of #1, #2, and #4 that I listed earlier.
So, has anyone managed to use external videos (YouTube, Vimeo, JWPlayer, etc.) and stay keyboard accessible?
I did see that using YouTube in a web object allowed the tabbing within YouTube to work, but there's so much other stuff on the YouTube page that you end up tabbing through a lot of other things before the tab gets back to the Storyline player. We use Vimeo and I was unable to tab into the Vimeo page when I inserted it as a web object.
I tried "hacking" the Storyline HTML5 player and was able to substitute in my Vimeo videos by editing the data.js and app.min.js files so that videos that I embedded while authoring the course were replaced by external videos when the course ran. This worked for desktop browsing, but I had troubles with mobile. Plus, a workaround like this can lead to other unforeseen issues later, so I'm uneasy about pursuing that solution.
Any solutions, leads, advice you can offer is appreciated. Thanks!
12 Replies
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No replies, so I'm bumping it back to the top.
Hi Erich,
Sorry you haven't heard from folks in the community yet. I'd also suggest reaching out in the Building Better Courses side of ELH and see if there is anyone who can help! That side tends to focus more on design and how to and ways to modify the published output.
Those topics are all areas where we can't offer support so the ELH community is the best resource!
Bumping this again in case anyone has a solution.
I'm hoping someone will provide a solution to this.
We have the same problem so a solution would be incredibly helpful.
Same problem here too.
I am using embedded YouTube clips and require JAWs screen reader accessibility. Our tester is not able to exit the video successfully to navigate to the Back and Next buttons. For some reason they are reverted to the browser outside the slide the video sits on despite the tab order of the slide indicating the next tabbing option after the video would be Back and Next buttons.
Does anyone know if there is a way past this issue?
Hello Kathy and Jessica,
Thanks for reaching out and letting us know that you're running into a similar issue.
Are you using a YouTube video embedded as a web object as well?
Storyline can select the entire web object container, but there isn't a way to force the focus inside web object since we're relying on the hosting site for video controls.
I just came across this issue as well. It's less about control within the web object, which works fine for me with a Vimeo embed. It's that I can't navigate OUT of the web object, which seems I should be able to do. I can do this in a web page with ease.
Hi Brian,
It looks like Leslie responded to you in this discussion here. Just wanted to link the conversation in case others came across this issue.
Let her know a little more about your experience, and we'll keep an eye out for your response!
Hi, I'm having this same issue, that I get "stuck" in the Vimeo web object, like Brian. Is there any way around that?
Hi Jenny,
Our team is currently looking into this issue and we will be sure to provide any updates as soon as we can!
In the meantime, a workflow that might help is to include one of the built-in player controls:
We have found that adding just one of the Player Controls (like the volume button for example), you are able to tab through the course without getting stuck on the Vimeo web object.
Hey Everyone!
I'm happy to return to this discussion with an update—we've fixed the issue where:
Be sure to install the latest Storyline 360 update (Build 3.50.24668.0) to take advantage of all the recent features and fixes.
If this happens again, please let us know! Or you can work directly with our support engineers here.