SL360 - Course-wide narration on/off toggle - best practice?
Jun 10, 2021
Hi, I'm a long-time SL2 user and just getting to grips with some of the newer functionality in SL360.
I've added voiceovers to ~20 slides within the project. The second slide in the project is a navigation one that explains the player controls.
I've added an Input object to this, and defined the variable 'PlayAudioNarration' with True/False options. On the subsequent slides, I've set it so that it only plays the audio on the timeline, if PlayAudioNarration is set to True.
Click the toggle so it's set as False, and all subsequent slides don't play the voiceover. All good so far.
The problem I've encountered, is when I go back to the navigation slide, and change the toggle so it's set back to True (e.g. the user has changed their mind).
If I re-visit a slide, the audio doesn't play. If I go to a new slide, the audio does play.
I assume it's something to do with the completion/viewed status of the slide, not re-validating the updated status of the PlayAudioNarration variable when re-visited?
What's the best way around it? I don't want to rely on the course 'Mute' option as the course also contains videos.
Thanks
5 Replies
Hi, Joe.
Thank you for reaching out and describing what you're looking to accomplish!
If you can share your .story file, I'm happy to take a look and help you troubleshoot, and I'm sure others in the community will be glad to make suggestions as well.
Like Maria says, we can't know what actually causes the problem without seeing the .story file, but if these conditions are all true, they would cause the problem you describe.
If the triggers to play are tied to the start of the slide timeline, and the slides are set to return to saved state, or choose automatically on Revisit, it would cause the revisited slides to ignore the audio on/off variable. Only Reset to Initial state restarts the timeline, and fires that trigger.
Hi both,
Thanks for the replies. I can't provide the exact file due to confidentiality but I can mock up a similar example early next week.
What Walt has described sounds like the issue (in that it needs to be reset to initial state). I'll look into that, but would that also mean that the 'tick' alongside the menu, to show that the slide has been viewed, would also be lost?
Yes, it would be. I get around that by setting those ticks manually, using variables and triggers. See a sample of how at this post:
https://community.articulate.com/discussions/articulate-storyline/free-sample-restricted-and-free-random-navigation-using-variables-and-triggers
Thanks Walt
I need to weigh up the lesser of two evils and the amount of work required/possibility of it tripping up.
I do seem to have got somewhere this morning, I now have variable triggers for False and True in the right order (for the toggle), and it seems like the reloading the slide part wasn't necessary.
Perhaps I'd missed something obvious in my testing (like a secondary trigger to reset it, though I thought I'd done it). The other slide triggers at the top, are to prevent the audio automatically resuming when you back to change the toggle.
Admittedly that's just SL360's preview and not within the LMS itself, so I may need to revisit this.