Forum Discussion
IMPORTANT! - a fix if you have a PLAY button appearing at start of courses
OK, Articulate rolled out an update to Storyline and it seems that now when publishing a course, instead of auto-playing (as before) it now puts a nasty big PLAY button on the first screen.
Hopefully Articulate will roll out a fix (very!) soon.
In the meantime, I have discovered that AUDIO on the opening slide will cause this. Removing the audio, removed the PLAY button and things went back to normal.
Therefore to get round the issue, try what I did - create a tiny opening slide of a flat colour (same as your project background) and set it to be your opening slide.
Worked well for me, and thankfully I can now stop hearing screaming from my clients.
@Rachel - Thats very odd behaviour. What browser/platform is it not working on?
If you were to put an audio trigger on that first slide, would that help (eg. place your audio on a separate layer and "Show Layer" trigger?)
Rachel,
The blank slide will allow the project to play without the the play button, but the user must click somewhere before any media will play.
Hi Rachel,
Yes, you won't see the play button in your example, but you'll need to have some user initiation on the first slide to allow the audio to play. This is browser and domain-specific as if the user has previously allowed audio to play on that site (i.e. pressed play, unmuted it, etc.) Chrome is keeping track of that and using it to determine how it should behave in the future.
Gotcha. Thanks, everyone!
Ted, this is my understanding: I checked some old courses published before the last SL update, and they work too. However, some not. In particular, they always don't work in the Review platform and in local too. From my understanding, some LMSs (like Moodle for example) have a way of overriding the do-not-autoplay setting by Chrome, and the courses play along well... however I think Articulate has no way of knowing the final deployment environment of the course, so the (ugly) button was the quickest save-all solution for this situation.
I think that this was mainly Chrome developer's fault, because obviously did not took in consideration that HTML5 is not only used for websites today, but also for games, e-learning, apps, and all other sorts of things. All situations in which the autoplay of video and audio is not only well-accepted by users, but somewhat necessary for the user experience...
I too hope that this get solved too from one of the two sides, because I think anyone is fearing lots of old clients coming back and complaying that the courses aren't working... :-(
Is there a way/tool to run an update on all previously published courses so they will have the fix rather than republishing all of them individually with the updated Articulate version?
Thank you!
I have to report that I am finding the play button appear on both Chrome and FireFox at the start of a module containing audio on the first slide on Articulate Review, and our LMS, but not on Tempshare.
Whilst on older versions of the same module on Articulate Review this is not a problem. I am currently running the latest version and have recently republished to Articulate Review and our LMS and still found the same issue.
Little bit of a concern. :(
Hi Martin,
The play button is expected in Chrome based on the changes they implemented for autoplay. As for Firefox, our team is still looking into that as Firefox has yet to share that they're implementing the same restrictions around autoplay.
We'll let you know here as soon as we can.
Is a quick fix to have 2 slides. The 1st slide look the same as the second but only last 0.1secs, then the second slide can come in with the audio?
Hi David,
This is a method a few other users have used but the first slide needs to have some type of user interaction to allow the autoplay to occur after that. The user interaction is what is telling browsers like Chrome that the user would like the media elements to play automatically.
Hey everyone,
This article may offer a workaround for those that can adjust the settings of their Chrome browser. You can disable the autoplay-policy flag by changing it to "no user gesture required"—that should allow the course to autoplay as before.
https://9to5google.com/2018/02/15/how-to-disable-autoplay-videos-chrome/
Hope that helps!
I'm having this issue as well. Because I have a menu, I don't want to add a blank slide w/o audio to open - because it will show up in the menu OR I must manually go into every file and remove this from the menu.
Any idea when this will be dealt with?
Matthew may have the best idea here:
https://community.articulate.com/discussions/articulate-storyline/chrome-66-autoplay-policy-changes
