Using NVDA with Storyline
Dec 21, 2023
Hi folks,
I'm hoping to begin testing courses with screen readers to my team in the near future to improve course accessibility, but I am struggling to get NVDA to recognize the storyline window as a readable object. It will read the window title but won't read any content inside the course.
I've looked at all the screen reader resources I could find on e-learning heroes and articulate, but none of them cover the actual testing of the content with a screen reader, just how to set up the content. This problem may be because I'm new to using NVDA.
Are there any tutorials on testing Storyline courses with screen readers or troubleshooting when they don't work? Has anyone else had this problem and know a solution?
Thanks!
1 Reply
Hi Catherine,
If you are going to test your courses with NVDA, your best first step is to export the course and either test it in your LMS environment or test the story.html file in a Publish for Web output. I would not recommend testing the course in Review 360 or in preview mode in Storyline.
You'll definitely want to get comfortable with what the keyboard shortcuts are for NVDA; starting with the tab key, shift + tab, the arrow keys, and the enter and spacebar. The Articulate community team wrote a really helpful article on the keyboard shortcuts that is available here!
Once you tab to the slide, you should be able to press enter to activate NVDA reading the slide. If you haven't set up a custom focus order, then by default the screen reader is going to read the content left to right, top to bottom. Activate interactive objects using your tab key, and use your arrow keys to navigate between non-interactive objects like text boxes. You can press the H key to jump to the next heading on the slide (keep in mind you will need to have used the text styles in Storyline for NVDA to be able to recognize what a heading is).
I hope that helps get you started in the right direction!