Accessibility gets better in Articulate Storyline

Here at Pathways Training and eLearning, we have always worked with our clients to achieve the level of accessibility they require for their eLearning projects, keeping AODA standards in mind (for those of you who don’t know, when it comes to AODA for web applications, these have to be compliant with WCAG 2.0).

For the most part of our experience, it has been a positive experience making courses accessible, not to say that we haven’t had challenges but we have always been able to find a work around. Of course, accessibility is not only about adding closed captions to audio and videos, or having the course be completely navigable using the keyboard, but also it is about colour contrast, image and video descriptions and in general, provide learners with alternatives to what the course intends to show.

However, one of the things that would usually cause the most problems is the player itself, since as developers there isn’t much we can do improve the accessibility in that part of our eLearning courses.

Thankfully, this morning as I opened my Storyline to begin my work, I got the news that there is an update that largely improves the accessibility in Storyline, most specifically in the player. Here are some of the new features that come in the new update:

Learners have more screen reader choices.
Player controls have been organized into logical groups, ARIA landmarks have been added, and player features have been restructured to follow a consistent order and hierarchy.
Player controls are grouped semantically, organized coherently, and labeled correctly.
New player settings have also been added, such as:
- The ability to change the focus colour in both the modern and classic players
- The skip navigation shortcut can now be disabled