Forum Discussion
Inheritance of alt text by states in Storyline
Hi RichardPrince - I just performed some testing, and I'm finding that NVDA is announcing alt text during the preview. Last year, we implemented a new setting allowing screen reader support to be disabled. Can you check that the option is checked/enabled for you?
Screen reader support during preview is now optional. Turn it on in the Storyline Options window
@RichardPrince the reason for this (at least with a radio button) is that we use a real html radio button element in this scenario so that screen readers behave traditionally. There may be a way to get the behavior that you want, but we'd need to see your story file.
As far as states for normal buttons etc... we'd again want to get a story file and log an issue with support. 508/Accessibility is a very complex area.
MathNotermans-9 This doesn't have anything to do with the js api thankfully :D
Hi Zevan, well, having sat yesterday evening editing all of the states in all of the radio buttons, my story file no-longer has this issue, because I have changed all 225 alt texts! I played around with it again today, and seem to be able to get the alt text working by editing just the selected and normal states of the buttons (I had thought the screen reader was picking up the hover state alt text). This means there is a work around:
- Create radio buttons but do not put them into groups
- Set all buttons to normal and then edit the alt text in Focus Order
- Set all buttons to selected and then edit the alt text in Focus Order
- Make button groups
This only requires twice as much work as if the radio button states automatically took their alt text from the normal state, but at least it is not 5x as much!
I probably would have found this work around much sooner, but for the fact that testing Storyline output with NVDA is so time consuming. As I am sure you are aware, the preview window does not pass any alt text to screen readers, so my work flow has necessitated uploading each attempt to Rise, and testing there. Any chance Storyline could get a fix to make accessibility easier to check - given it is a legal requirement that the output I generate from Storyline is accessible, I would have hoped that Articulate would be trying to find ways to make checking accessibility easier?
Best wishes
Richard
RichardPrince I'm glad you found a workaround. It sure would be great if NVDA worked in preview. You should put in a feature request for that. I suspect if it's possible to do it that would be simple - screen readers are very unpredictable though.
Isn't that a great option or at least testcase for the upcoming accessibility checker inside Storyline?
Here you can signup for the bèta for the accessibility checker
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfYn0XTd0RvGz9TtcdJhYgayLBzaYdIxqMt84ms896h4xpOCw/viewform?pli=1
RichardPrince I'm glad you found a workaround. It sure would be nice if NVDA worked with preview - you should put in a feature request. If it's possible, it might be an easy fix - you never know with screen readers, they can be very unpredictable.
Hi Zevan
Perhaps the issue is with Storyline rather than NVDA? NVDA is not realistically going to put effort into fixing an incompatibility between their software and Storyline, given that a microscopic fraction of NVDA users also use Storyline. I would have thought the onus would be on you guys to make sure your product works well with a tool that a lot of accessibility conscious authors are going to test their eLearning content with......
RichardPrince Sorry if that was unclear, I meant put in a feature request for Storyline - so that we can investigate - I'm actually surprised that we haven't heard anything about this.
