IMPORTANT! - a fix if you have a PLAY button appearing at start of courses

Hi Andrew,

for me it works in Firefox, but not in Chrome: the dreaded button disappears, but the audio just won't play on the real starting slide. The inspector reports this: "The AudioContext was not allowed to start. It must be resume (or created) after a user gesture on the page."

So it looks like Chrome is waiting for some input on the user's side to start playing the audio, like a click or a gesture. Did you manage to make it work in Chrome too?

Having the same issue and tried the workaround of adding a blank .25 second-long slide at the beginning that jumps to the next slide when the timeline ends, but now the audio on the "real" starting slide doesn't play the first time around. I have to refresh the slide to get the audio to play. I will have to stick the with big play button for now and warn reviewers it might appear.

I published the course to Web and uploaded it to Tempshare and didn't see the big play button. For me, it only seems to be happening in Articulate Review. I'm hoping it doesn't occur in the client's LMS and we're all good... 

@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!

I don't understand why ends users always have to apply some sort of work around when an update is not well tested.  I loaded three courses before the latest 360 update with Chrome 66 and they are deployed as designed.  The last two courses I upload to our LMS with the latest 360 update, are giving me the "PLAY" button.  What I am saying is, if it was a Chrome issue, then why are my first three course work without the play button?  All of the course has an audio file on the first slide.

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. :(