Storyline player and JAWS testing
Mar 30, 2015
Hello!
I am new to the Storyline. I managed to create my first course in Storyline 2 and found a lot of good solutions and tips in this forum. Thank you very much!
My client is a government agency, which mandates all courseware to be Section 508 compliant. We've decided to purchase and create courseware in Articulate Storyline because of the claim that software itself is Section 508 compliant and that designers/developers can use the Storyline features to make specific elements accessible.
I have inserted the alt tags on all my elements and left them enabled for access to people with disabilities (i.e., this was the default state). After reading through numerous forum posts regarding Section 508 implementation, I am aware of some common and known issues with accessibility features in Storyline (i.e., that images with multiple states, markers, hyperlinks).
We've just completed the first round of JAWS screen reader and keyboard navigation testing, but it did not go well. I can tab through the player, some page elements, and navigation bar, but JAWS does not read any of them when I press ENTER. The only Storyline player JAWS announces is the Notes panel, but it does not read the content within it. All other elements it simply announces as "TAB".
The button functionality does not work either when I navigate with the keyboard, so when I select the Next button, for example, it does not jump to the next page.
I looked at the Storyline options and did not see anything regarding accessibility features I could modify, enable or disable. Has anyone else experienced this problem or managed to solve it in some way?
3 Replies
Hi Katarina,
I'm sorry to hear that the testing didn't go well. I'd want to gather a bit more information regarding how you published the course and in what environment, browser, etc. you were testing the content? I don't know a lot about JAWS specifically, but I have heard other users share that it is supported in the latest version of JAWS with the latest version of Internet Explorer (11). You'll also want to confirm that you're testing the published output within the intended environment as described here.
Also, if you'd like to send the course along here our team can take a look at it as well.
Thank you Ashley for a quick response and for pointing out the proper testing environment!
I initially published the course for the Web delivery and viewed it from my local drive, in IE10 and tested it with the latest version of JAWS (i.e., v.16).
I've just tested the course again by running it from my Dropbox. I am happy to report that JAWS did read the player features and moved through some page elements. The tab order is still a mess, the content in layers is inaccessible for most of my pages since they are triggered by the images with multiple states, the marker content nor hyperlinks are accessible.
I am glad that the Notes/Transcript section is accessible, so that we are satisfying at least the delivery of text-only requirement.
Thanks again!
Awesome - happy to hear things are working a bit better when testing in the intended environment. The tab order is something we've heard before in regards to features - so the more requests the better!
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