Storyline 360 - Tab order resets when a slide layer is shown or hidden.

I was actually doing some testing of Focus Order and layers today in the most recent version, and here’s what I found…

Testing conditions: NVDA+Chrome; layers where shown via objects (shapes in one test, pictures in another, same results with both) that had ‘show layer when user clicks’ triggers; layers contained objects with ‘hide this layer when user clicks’ triggers.

If the layer had the ‘Prevent users from clicking on other layers’ layer property assigned: when you opened the layer, focus would go to the element in the layer that was highest in the Focus Order—same behavior I’ve encountered for a long time. But, when you hid the layer, focus would go back to the object used to open the layer in the first place—different than previously experienced behavior, where focus would land on whatever detectable object came next in the Focus Order (ie, whatever was after the object that had the ‘hide layer when user clicks’ trigger).

If the layer did not have the Prevent… property assigned, when you opened the layer, focus would stay on the object with the show layer trigger—same behavior as experienced for some time. And when I closed the layer, focus would go to a random spot in the Focus Order, but for me, always one after the object with the hide layer trigger, so more toward the end of the slide’s Focus Order and not toward the top as others reported—this has been my experience for years.

And actually, the whole reason I did this testing was that I was finding other Focus Order irregularities: objects being skipped; differences reading backwards compared to forwards. I didn’t end up finding a consistent rule or pattern I can share, unfortunately.

I think some solid testing needs to be done on this area. I've just switched some layers to "prevent" and they are behaving better, i.e, focus returning to the button that triggered the layer.

I have some really bizarre results though where slides using identical set-up have different results. I need to look further in to those slides and see what the differences are.

Other things I've seen having an impact are Heading on layers (good impact) and animation (bad impact). Key elements need to be at the start of the timeline in the layer in order to ensure they are picked up by the screen reader.

It would be good for Articulate to focus on this issue as it's a significant one in my opinion, or provide the best practice development method.

We're running into these issues quite a bit now too. The worst part is that it's the same as Sam Hill's above where identical slides are behaving differently. Much like others though, there can be some benefit/workaround by using 'prevent' but this in turn blocks using shared navigation on the base layer - which creates a LOT of extra / duplicate development work for something that should just do what it's supposed to.

For what it's worth, I've spent the past week updating a project from SL3 to SL360, and when testing it, I've been experiencing slightly better behavior in regards to this issue: that is, when closing layers that do not have the "Prevent users from clicking on other layers" property applied, I've had my focus land where I'd want/expect within the base layer a surprising amount of times. It's still far from perfect -- I don't think I'm getting the desired behavior even 50% of the time -- but it's better than finding this issue in every single slide.

Unfortunately, I cannot explain these better findings or connect them to a recommendation. I hesitate to say it's thanks to having a newer version of SL360; I'm using v3.66.28270 now but might've been using that version in the testing mentioned in my 7/20/22 post, and I'm not seeing anything related to this is the v3.66.28270 version history. I doubt it's because I was converting an old project, since usually I encounter more issues, not fewer, with pre-SL360 projects.

Thanks for the update Douglas - our experience is also typically less than 50% success, in 360 as well and we pickup the updates as soon as they come out. The only way we've found any consistency whatsoever is via the 'prevent' method, but as also mentioned this comes at the cost of duplicating all navigation on every layer and this is a significant undertaking on some interactions (consider a slide with 10 buttons or vertical tabs or accordion interactions with variables for interaction locking/tracking) this quickly gets messy.

Has this been resolved yet? We're considering adding Articulate as one of our tools, but there are a lot of accessibility issues. I'm experiencing the same issue where when you close a layer, the focus goes back to the top of the base layer, this is SL360 v3.71.29339.0