Forum Discussion
AI Avatar Videos and Accessibility
Hi Everyone! I'm working on an online orientation course and have created an AI generated Avatar to be the course's "guide." The way I have the Avatar set up is in video format so she can speak to the viewer. Right now the Avatar videos are set to Automatically play when the user is on the slide that a video is on. However, I'm trying to be cognizant of screen readers as I want the orientation course to be Accessible. I know that it's best practice to set videos up to either play when clicked or triggered but I kind of feel that that takes away from the role of the Avatar as the guide. Does anyone have any ideas of how I can set up these Avatar videos to make them work with a screen reader but not take away the guide role? Thanks!!
3 Replies
That's a really interesting question! MelanieSobie-14 WilliamTempe429 and SamHill might have some ideas for you.
I wonder if you could have a trigger at the beginning of each slide to pause the timeline, so then the user has to take action to select the video play button to get started? Not sure if that trigger could be placed on the master slide, but that is probably worth testing out.
This is a different situation, but this example might help you come up with a way to handle things. I once developed a course that had navigation set to auto-advance at the end of each slide. However, I needed to allow screen reader users to have control and not be auto-advanced. I configured all of the slides to advance only "by user", and created a variable for Screen Reader User T/F. On a slide at the beginning I placed a question to ask the user if they were a screen reader user - select Yes/N. On the Master Slide, I had a trigger to jump to next slide at the end of the timeline if the screen reader variable was false.
Hi StephanieDig614 the best solution is to default to not auto playing. Otherwise, screen reader users may need to continually stop the audio/video playback on each slide before they are able to start reading the contents.
To support users who would like to use the avatar, you could include an option at the beginning of the module (and the same option can be accessed from anywhere in the course) to allow the user to select if the want to autoplay the avatar narration.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Would you like the video avatar to play automatically?
( ) Yes
( ) No
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
This would then set a variable "autoPlayAvatar", which is then used, on each slide, to determine if the avatar media should play. The key being, the default is to not play, but if "autoPlayAvater is equal to TRUE, play media …".
As mentioned, it would be beneficial to provide easy, accessible, access to change this decision at any point within the module.
