Storyline 360 not compliant with WCAG 2.1 AA accessibility guidelines

Hi Leslie,

I’m glad we’re on the same page now and both agree that the WCAG 2.1 Level AA criteria not being met by Storyline 360 affect any user who has included a text entry field in their course requiring learners to enter their name.

 

I would still appreciate a response from @John Morgan though, in relation to his statement in this thread that criterion 1.3.5 only relates to “a custom design, which we could not support”. I'd like to find out exactly what was meant by that statement, and if my explanation of criterion 1.3.5 in my previous post has change his mind about this?

 

Regarding the feature request for text entry fields to allow purpose declaration, could you please provide a ballpark time frame for when this will be added to Storyline’s functionality? I know Articulate is known to leave bugs unresolved for years —and in some cases more than a decade—so I’m not getting my hopes up for something that’s classified as a ‘feature request’ rather than a bug. But, given that non-compliance with accessibility guidelines is a critical concern for many users, I’m hoping this will be taken more seriously by Articulate.

 

As mentioned, in my particular case, where my clients require compliance with WCAG 2.1 Level AA, I need to now advise them to remove the ‘Enter your name’ text entry fields from all of their courses, due to Storyline’s limitations. This will be a time-consuming and costly undertaking, as I’m sure is the case for anyone else using this feature. And as you can imagine, they certainly won’t be happy that even though they trusted Articulate’s claims that it supports WCAG 2.1 Level AA, they now need to remove this personalisation feature from their courses, due to the software’s limitations.

 

Following Articulate’s promotion of ‘Enter your name’ text entry fields to personalise courses, they appear to be quite commonly used among Storyline users. Some examples of users using this feature can be found in this thread, this thread, this thread and this thread. Therefore, I think we can safely say that there’s a large number of users out there who are also affected by this accessibility issue, and if they are, their courses are not compliant with WCAG 2.1 Level AA. It’s highly likely that these users may not even be aware of this (just as you weren’t aware of what was meant by criterion 1.3.5). And if these users happen to be falsely claiming to their clients or employers that their courses are fully accessible (given that Articulate promotes Storyline as supporting accessibility and buries the non-compliance notes in the ‘fine print’), then this is a potential legal issue for Articulate.

 

An ideal solution would be for this feature to be included in the next update, so that we don’t need to remove all of the ‘Enter your name’ text entry fields from our courses.

 

I look forward to your reply and John's reply.