WCAG 2.0: ARIA attributes and Storyline 360

Aug 16, 2018

Hi all - I am helping my team meet WCAG 2.0 requirements for a customer with courses created in Articulate Storyline 360. According to the WCAG VPAT for Storyline, the following standard is author controlled: 4.1.2 Name, Role, Value.

How is this controlled/changed/edited, and how could we ensure this is changed through the tool and not through manually changing any of the output (published files/code)?

For example: how would we change the values for the following attributes for aria-describedby="unspoken" or aria-labelledby="label-1-0-5"?

36 Replies
valerie ryan

Hello, we are having issues with our customer running one of our courses on their website that we published to HTML5 using the modern player. Please see screen capture attached. It looks like there is an issue with the player navigation causing the aria errors. Has anyone had anything similar and/or any suggestions on how to fix this?

valerie ryan

Hello, we are running into issues with stoyline 360 course that is resulting in Broken Aria references. We worked with an Articulate engineer to try and solve this issue and changed to the modern player. Unfortunately, our customer's testing is still coming up with the same issues. Can you assist in a solution for this? It appears that this issue is not something that is author controlled. Also wondering if this is an iFrame issue. Can you assist?

Karin Carlson

Adding to the previous post reply about ARIA: ARIA is a set of attributes that are added to HTML to communicate additional information about roles of elements, state changes, etc.; WCAG is a specification giving guidance to developers about web accessibility. I'm interested to know if ARIA is something that could be incorporated into Storyline through the interface to give additional information and in particular, roles. At the current time, Storyline doesn't give appropriate roles to headings, lists, etc., which I think you are working on, but ARIA would give us more flexibility.

valerie ryan

Thanks for your post, Karin. I agree. We are still not able to pass accessibility scans due to ARIA. Can the Storyline folks please provide us with an update as to when we might see this incorporated in to Storyline and Rise? We are really having trouble with this as developers. Thanks

Ren Gomez

Hi Karin and Valerie,

Thanks for following up! While I can't provide an exact timeframe for semantic formatting, I can let you know that this is currently in development, along with other accessibility features in our roadmap:

Our conformance report also shares details on additional ways to meet the WCAG 1.3.1 criterion:

Storyline 360 already associates labels with form elements. And here are some additional ways you can convey info and relationships to learners with assistive technologies:

  • Use the built-in menu or create your own custom menu to convey the structure of your course.
  • Organize slide text with tables, headings, lists, and blank lines between paragraphs.
  • Add alternative text and a meaningful focus order to provide context for screen readers.
  • Offer text alternatives for info that’s only visual, such as color coding.

We'll be sure to jump back in here as soon as this feature has been implemented!

Leslie McKerchie

Hello everyone!

We just released another update for Articulate 360 and included a few new items you'll see in the release notes.

The items you'll be interested in is:

  • New: Let learners with accessibility needs change the visual appearance of text in a published course to make it more readable. Learn more about accessible text.
  • New: Text publishes with the proper semantic formatting for headings, links, lists, and other elements so screen reader users can explore content easily.
  • New: Use text styles to make content easy to navigate with a screen reader. Accessible text styles allow learners with visual disabilities to identify headings, hyperlinks, blockquotes, and paragraphs on each slide so they understand its layout and context. Learners can also use screen reader shortcuts to jump directly to headings and links.

Just launch the Articulate 360 desktop app on your computer and click the Update button for Storyline 360. Details here.

Please let us know if you have any questions, either here or by reaching out to our Support Engineers directly.