Storyline and JAWS - setting course up and testing with JAWS

Hi everyone,

I wanted to share a few more details on our work in this area.

First up, we strongly believe that as many people as possible should be able to fully experience training created with our tools.

As accessibility requirements and standards have evolved, we recognize that our authors have found it increasingly challenging to create accessible content using our authoring tools.

We’ve been investing in accessibility improvements in our tools for some time. Closed captions, text-to-speech, and improved management of alt text and captions in media library are a few examples in Storyline alone.

We’ve also been working behind the scenes for well over a year to fundamentally restructure our published output. We’re working on additional accessibility features for Storyline, with the goal of making it fully compliant with WCAG 2.1 and s.508:

• Our initial focus is the player frame. We’re improving the way learners move around a course, ensuring that all controls, menus, and dialogs are correctly labeled and structured. This work has been progressing well and we’re aiming to have an early version in Beta in Q3.
• Next, we’ll tackle the slide content itself, starting with the basics (reading text, navigation, layer interactions) before addressing specific areas like quizzing, interactions, and media playback.
• Finally, we’ll be improving key workflows in Storyline to expose new functionality and make it easier to create inclusive courses without a lot of extra effort.

We’ve had ongoing conversations with our customers and will be addressing a number of longstanding accessibility issues and reported bugs as part of this work. We’ll also be expanding our official support for screen readers beyond JAWS to include other popular tools on desktop and mobile.

We’re not ready to talk about timings in detail yet, but we’re planning to roll out improvements in phases, starting with the player frame. We’re aiming to get the first improvements released towards the end of this year.

We’re committed to making Storyline courses accessible to learners with a wide range of abilities and needs and look forward to working with our customers to get there.

If you're interested in participating in the Beta process when we're ready to start testing, please email beta@articulate.com.

- Simon