Is there an autoplay for the audio ?

In my own experience, when I offer clients the option to develop in Storyline or Rise, and have to point out that in Rise the audio will not autoplay on each slide, then unless the customer decides to skip audio altogether, they inevitably opt to go with Storyline because they feel (and I agree 100%) that forcing the learner to click to play audio on each and every slide significantly deteriorates the learner's experience. It flies in the face of decades of end-user eLearning experience.  Stopping the course at every single slide for an extra click instead of offering a pleasing flow irritates the learner--or, as others point out, the learner simply skips the audio (and forcing them to go back to play it by means of an end-of-section control block only increases the resentment factor). While of course no crucial learning content should be in VO only, if one adds VO to a course it's there for a reason and needs to be heard smoothly and seamlessly.

Back when Rise was first released I asked about this issue and Articulate said the various browsers were forcing this limitation.  If that's not still the case, and if the autoplay option can in fact be offered, from a learner experience standpoint this should be a no-brainer.  I realize it may not be easy on the development side.  But isn't the learner's experience what it's all about? If the source of this issue remains the browser companies--then go back to the table with them and push back about offering at least the option.

Articulate has added so many wonderful elements to Rise, including Storyline interactions and now branching scenarios. All wonderful innovations. But at the end of the day, if Rise can't autoplay the audio on each slide, that simple failing is a complete deal-breaker for most of my clients, and I don't get to use Rise and all those great features.  In fact, it happened again with a new client this afternoon. He loved the idea of the online development tool and was all set to have me use Rise until I explained the audio limitation.  He immediately said: "You're joking. That's ridiculous. That won't work for my audience."

There you have it. Browsers, meet eLearning.  Please, if this feature can be added, think of the learner's experience, and make it a priority. I almost never get to use Rise because of this one issue. "For want of the nail, the shoe was lost...."

"We believe that requiring some kind of action from the user, such as clicking a button before playing audio, is the right approach to ensure a unified experience for all learners." 
I guess I don't understand why this can't just be an option.  That's like saying 'we believe that only using grey font color is the right approach to ensure a unified experience for all learners'. Yes, that ensures that everything looks the same but not everyone builds courses in the same way so users are all going to have different experiences. 
I am asking for audio autoplay because our users HATE the extra clicks. They like to scroll, read, scroll, read, scroll, watch a video. Not scroll, click play, read.  They end up not clicking the play button and missing the audio altogether.  Some have mentioned that clicking play for audio is not a meaningful click - 100% agree. 

So our company create various courses for multiple use cases primarily software technical training videos along with on boarding, human resources, legal compliance training and internal staff training. A lot of the technical courses are converted from legacy content such as PowerPoints. The way we structure the content is a blend of theory and practical video labs. With each theory topic (theory being the written content) is being coupled audio underneath. For each topic we have may have few sections related to that topic. The audio piece (narration) will touch on the theory elements but provide a better contextual overview of that particular section or topic. In between each section we have continue buttons and I understand that we could lock this down and force people to interact with everything above. But this in turn will restrict the user and cause frustration (I know this because we did a trial user testing with this approach).

You say you believe in creating a unified experience for all learners, I totally agree with this. I believe in creating a unified seamless solution and making people click an audio button every single time is going against creating a a n unified experience for learners, it's actually hindering them and causing frustration because people are at times not clicking it and just reading the theory thus missing out on relevant and important information. 

If there was a handful of audio blocks in a module all well and good, this wouldn't be so bad. But when we have 30-40 per module this becomes a great challenge.

Through my education I have studied meaningful user interaction and design usability. I am a big believer in creating interactions and making the learner have to click buttons to increase interactivity and engagement but those are for when there are specific use cases for specific learning outcomes like sorting activities and knowledge checks or elements like accodians or flip cards...... However........ Forcing a leaner to press a play button is NOT MEANINGFUL and creates an unified, non seamless eb and flow to courses. 

You can see from peoples reactions that we is really sought after. There is a huge demand for this within the e-learning community using Rise as their main authoring tool. This community has world class industry leader in instructional designers, trainers and multimedia professionals. All we are asking is for a simple thing... Give us a choice of auto play, let the instructional designers and authors decide what works best for their particular instance/use case. 

This is something that I feel really strongly about as you may have gathered. So I ask you kindly, to please discuss this with your development team and leaders. Show them our messages and requests. If you could do that I would really appreciate it. Thank you very much for taking the time to read my message. 

Kindest Regards, Martin Dunne. 

I agree with nearly everyone else's statements above that having an auto-play option for audio I'm inserting is crucial for my courses. The audio isn't just an 'extra' or a learning block on its own (this wouldn't be in line with best practices for either learning or accessibility), but is an important part of the learning that happens through an entire course. 

Came here looking for why autoplay couldn't be activated while testing a trial, what a disappointment...
I don't understand the reluctance after reading this forum? It seems like lots of people aim to use this in closed systems. Why does the development team not want to offer it as an option? 

This system would have been perfect for my needs but is a deal breaker, every person will ask why the audio doesn't autoplay.

Having the option for audio autoplay gets a +1 from me. 

Hi everyone. I recieved the same feedback with regard to autoplay. Would be nice to see this 3 yr old request being considered :-)

Auto-play of audio needs to be included as a choice.

I'd like to bump this up, too... my organization's design standards are to have any video or audio auto-play, keeping clicks and interactions valuable, and action-learning focused.

To have the ability to turn on/off audio as is now on Facebook would be a "nice to have", but not a requirement for my company. Auto-play, (especially for audio), however, is.  

"Articulate has added so many wonderful elements to Rise, including Storyline interactions and now branching scenarios. All wonderful innovations. But at the end of the day, if Rise can't autoplay the audio on each slide, that simple failing is a complete deal-breaker"

Thanks Andrew, I fully support your statement!

Autoplay of videos is also a non-feature of rise. The storyline block, however, is played automatically and that is great. As an instructional designer I can choose if I want to use the autoplay or if I want the learner to click the play button (even though I have to it in SL). But that's how I love to work: taking the perspective of the learner and providing the best learner experience possible.

BTW: you can insert an autoplay SL block with audio only ;-)

... but it's ugly