Where is the keyboard focus indicator?

May 20, 2021

For those of you who create courses that are intended to meet WCAG accessibility guidelines, are you aware that the keyboard focus indicator (the yellow rectangle) no longer works in Storyline?

This is a breach of WCAG Guideline 2.4.7: "Any keyboard operable user interface has a mode of operation where the keyboard focus indicator is visible."

The focus indicator was present in earlier versions of Storyline, but is no longer working.

I have attached two videos. One demonstrates this not working in the latest build of Storyline (Build 3.12). The other demonstrates when it was working in Storyline (Build 3.7).

I reported this to the Articulate team and they found that this was a result of changes that were implemented in the June 16, 2020 version (Build 3.10), and the advice I was given was, "As such, you may need to roll back to the January 7, 2020 version (Build 3.9) to override these changes".

It appears that in Build 3.9, Storyline implemented a new accessible player which enables users to 'change the accessibility focus color'. However, this feature isn't very useful if the accessibility focus rectangle isn't visible at all, right?

I do not want to roll back to a 16 month old version of Storyline in order to have the accessibility focus working again, as I don't want to lose the other fixes implemented since then. Articulate claims that Storyline is fully compliant with accessibility guidelines, so I don't understand how this issue even exists, let alone why it has gone unnoticed for 15 months!

Does anyone have a suggestion or a workaround for this, until this is fixed??

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