Forum Discussion
Microsoft Edge Read Aloud Feature Not Working with eLearning Courses
I have recently discovered Microsoft Edge's read aloud feature that displays when accessing eLearning courses via an Edge browser. See attached screenshots.
However, this feature is not working properly. I am finding that, when activated, it reads the title slide over and over again, regardless of which slide is actually being viewed, or worse, it reads the menu controls repeatedly, saying stuff like 'Main Slide' or 'Menu' each time the play icon is selected.
This is definitely a Microsoft Edge feature as it doesn't show up when courses are viewed via Google Chrome. And it also displays regardless of the platform / LMS used to access the course (i.e. our main LMS and also when viewed via ScormCloud), so it's not an LMS feature / issue.
Has anyone else encountered issues like this? If so, how did you fix them? I'd be happy with just disabling the feature if it can't be fixed, but I can't even see how to do that. Any advice would be much appreciated. Thanks.
3 Replies
I've just been doing some accessibility testing and Microsoft Edge Read Aloud feature does not appear to be compatible with Articulate Storyline, though it works fine with Rise 360. I think this is really disappointing as Articulate is one of the biggest providers of eAuthoring tools and Microsoft is one of the biggest providers of online browsers. I know there are workarounds like using text to speech buttons, but that is a huge amount of extra work for the developer, especially if you have a large existing library of Articulate content. It's also not intuitive for learners who know they can use this feature for most other online content. I'd be interested to understand if Articulate are working with Microsoft on this at all.
Thanks for starting the conversation, Kathleen.
I am running into the same issue with Microsoft Edge only reading slide titles in published eLearning courses from Storyline.
I received a request from a learner who wanted an audio version of the course because the Read aloud feature in Microsoft Edge was reading objects and shapes.
When editing the file, I rearranged the order of items in Focus Mode but when testing, it only read the slide title. Which is also another problem for me now!
I am still investigating how I can solve this request for my learner.
Hi Kathleen!
Happy to help with this!
Checking the Microsoft support community, disabling the Read Aloud feature in Edge is not yet possible. I'll open the floor to other Edge users here, to share additional insight with you!
