Forum Discussion
Black screen with Play Icon
Hi Bridget. This usually happens if you have media (video or audio) on your first slide, and WCAG and most browser protocols prohibit 'autoplay' of media on first load.
This thread contains more info and some workarounds.
Black start screen | Articulate - Community
But in my experience, if you add a completely blank slide at the start of your project, remove the default Back and and Next buttons, and then add a trigger "When timeline starts jump to next slide", this can trick Chrome, Edge and Firefox into loading your true first slide without showing the black screen and Play button.
This won't work on mobile devices, however, and in some corporate intranets, so I'd recommend testing it.
Hi Jonathan,
Thanks for the workaround hint with the mentioned trigger. I tested it, and it works perfectly when played in the Storyline Player. However, after integrating the interaction into the corresponding Rise project, the voice audio is no longer audible. Without the blank first slide it's audible but then I have those annoying black screen elements. Do you have any idea why this might be happening?
Hello RolandStraub-e1,
Thanks for reaching out! I understand you're not hearing the audio when viewing your Storyline project in Rise 360 after using Jonathan's workaround.
- Is this happening with any other Storyline projects you're bringing into Rise using a Storyline Block, or just this one?
It would be helpful to take a closer look at your .story file, a copy of your Rise course, and a screen recording of this behavior in Rise 360. Feel free to share it in this thread or privately in a support case to see if we experience the same thing with your project file. We'll delete your materials after testing!
Hello Luciana,
I guess I'm fine for now. Got great support from Jonathan_Hill and one workaround does the trick, even though still with black bars at the top and bottom.
I'll gladly get back to you in case and thank you for your availability.
Best Roland
I'm afraid without seeing the specific file or understanding more about the environment/browser/LMS your Rise course is running in, it's difficult to say. If you're only relying on the timeline to cue/trigger the audio, you may want to add a specific trigger (Play media X when timeline reaches X) perhaps?
Hi Jonathan,
Thx so much for your availability. I tried to film a bit, what I was writing about, plus I added the respective story file. Funily everything works fine while I preview it in storyline. After importing the interaction from the articulate review to the Rise project, one cannot hear the speech.
Hope I made my points clear and sorry, for my bad spoken English
Cheers Roland
Hey Roland - I think this is because Rise is a browser-based experience and most browsers, under WCAG, don't allow autoplay of media. The 'blank slide' technique gets around this for the visual aspect, but not the audio.
In short, I think audio has to be actively triggered - either by pressing play on that ugly black screen - or by another interaction. I tried to add a 'hover' trigger to the 4 images, but that didn't work.
So I put my thinking cap on and added some Javascript to the SL block. This detects if the block is running in Rise, and changes a T/F variable.
You can see the code working in Rise here.
However, even though I have added a trigger to play the TTS audio when Viewed_in_Rise becomes TRUE, the audio is still not playing. I think it's because the browser doesn't recognise this as a user interaction.
I can only conclude that Rise/browser conditions don't allow autoplay of media unless the user triggers it, and the only way around this is to add a button to your slide.
Entschuldigung!
