Strange Accessibility Behaviors: Yellow Highlights and unaccounted for objects appearing in the tab order.

Oct 24, 2019

I have been seeing some strange accessibility issues with a number of files:

The yellow highlight that is supposed to appear when tabbing from object to object does not always appear. This happens consistently with the Next buttons on our question pages.

It is also occurring with a series of pictures I'm using as buttons. Each "button" has a separate states for Normal, Correct and Incorrect. When I use pictures for each of the states, the yellow highlight never appears for any of the states. I've tried to work around this by creating a shape and using a "picture fill" for each state. In this version, the yellow highlight appears in the Normal state but not the Correct or Incorrect states.

Both of these issues have in common objects with different states. I know this has been a problem for a while in Storyline as I've gone through many discussion threads on this topic in your forums. When is it going to be fixed and what can we do in the meantime?

In addition, we're also seeing extra objects in the tab order on the question pages. They do not appear in the Tab Order dialog box, but are read by the screen reader (JAWS and NVDA) at the end of the tab order. Are you aware of this and is there anything we can do to mitigate the issue?

Any help is greatly appreciated.

Thank you.

14 Replies
Peter Chotin

Hi Vincent,

I received the email from Articulate Support and tried to upload the course several times. Unfortunately our firewalls will not allow me to upload the file.

Have you seen cases similar to this? What is Articulate doing to improve the accessibility functionality in Storyline? When can we expect this to get better?

Peter Chotin

Thank you Mathew. Is the timeline still accurate? That would mean we would be seeing some improvements in the next few months.

By the way, the situation that I'm seeing is pretty easy to reproduce:

1. Take a graphic and add a trigger to it that jumps to another slide.
2. Give the graphic 3 (or more states). Change the graphic for each state and add a check mark to the last state (Visited). Make sure that the accessibility text is set for each state, and turned off for the check mark.
3, Now try to tab through the page and see if the graphics are highlighted.

As another twist, initially make the graphic (button) disabled and enable it with a button click/trigger elsewhere on the slide.

Another scenario is to put the graphics in a shape:

1. Create a shape and use “picture fill” to add the picture.
2. Add a trigger.
3. Give the shape 3 states and add a separate graphic to each shape. Make sure that the accessibility text is set for each state. Do NOT include a check mark.
4. Now try to tab through the page and see if the graphics are highlighted in each state.

I found that initially they are highlighted (Normal state), but once the state is changed they no longer highlight.

I am using Storyline 3, update 6: 3.6.18134.0.

 

Peter Chotin

Unfortunately I cannot share files. What I am seeing, or rather not seeing is the yellow highlight box around graphic objects that have states. I gather that you're seeing them, right? What states are you using, the generic ones or states that you make up? I have seen this issue with both. But if you want to test this behavior further, try adding the states Correct and Incorrect to a graphic. Swap out the graphic for these states. That means that the graphic will have 3 states: Normal, Correct and Incorrect with a different graphic in each. Create a trigger on another page Does that still work?

Also, what version of Storyline are you using?

Thank you!

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