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LauraDavies's avatar
LauraDavies
Community Member
13 years ago

Storyline and JAWS - setting course up and testing with JAWS

We have a course for a client that needs to be 508 compliant. We've been learning Storyline along with the rest of you (and likely, not as quickly), and trying to set it up correctly to also be 508 compliant. The closed captioning is set up and working based on following tutorials  from this community ("Generating Closed Captions" - thank you Steve Flowers!). 

Our issue is in getting JAWS to read the course - I'm not sure if it's an LMS issue, or pieces I need to set up in Storyline that I haven't done.

We have tried to have a user who is blind test a sample of the course (5 slides) using JAWS on our LMS and also on ScormCloud. Each time she has tried, she has not been able to get farther than pressing enter to view the course and hearing:

~ the name of the course

~scormdriver_content frame

~scormdriver_content frame end

She tried pressing enter on each thing and nothing would start the course.

Our LMS employee tried to set the course start in a new window, and downloaded JAWS to test on his end. His response was:  She is right that nothing plays initially.  What she couldn't know is that Jaws is able to read some of the content.  When I click on the buttons or Nav links, Jaws reads the buttons.  It also reads the titles when I navigate the menu (it reads what I click on though, doesn't read it ahead of time.)  When I use the slash key, JAWS Tells me there are no clickable buttons.  It doesn't read any of the content either. 

I submitted a support case to Articulate to see if there are steps we are missing in the course. I gave the LMS person's response above. After a couple back and forths, the response I have from Articulate is: JAWS will only read the items that are highlighted.  It won't read anything ahead.  If it did read anything ahead, it would clash with the narration that is already on each slide & only confuse the end-user even more.  Finally, our output doesn't support the Slash key in the sense that the slash key will move to the next clickable item.  This shortcut key is typically associated with HTML content.

Honestly, I'm still lost. I've looked at all the tutorials I can find, and I'm just not seeing the post that makes it all click and make sense. I realize we must be missing several things here. 

Is there someone that has knowledge of working with JAWS that would be willing to either give suggestions or test our sample (published or storyline format) to see what we are missing?

  • Are there variables or triggers I need to place in the course specifically related to JAWS - ex. keystrokes, and if so, do those go on the master slides?
  • Our course currently has 7 scenes, and within each scene the slides advance automatically. For JAWS, do they instead need to advance by user?
  • From what I'm seeing in other posts, someone using JAWS needs to be able to turn the audio off, correct? 
  • Our quiz questions are all true/false or multiple choice.
  • Our full course is about 80 slides  (a 40 minute course) with full audio, and 2 1 minute videos at the beginning.

Would greatly appreciate your help.