In the upcoming video’s I’ll teach you how you can create Accessibile e-learning courses with Articulate Storyline. In the first video in this series I’ll explain the new Storyline Player Accessibility Controls feature, how it works and how you can use it for more Accessibility e-learning courses.
In the december 2020 update Articulate gave the Storyline 360 player a big facelift and They changed the order of the controls to a more logical order but also added Accessibility Controls for users and keyboard shortcuts so users can use shortcuts to operate your storyline course.
Accessibility Controls
In this video I’ll zoom in on the Accessibility Controls. This is the gear icon in the Storyline player.
If you start a new project they are turned on by default. For now there are three controls:
- zoom to fit
- Accessible text
- and Keyboard shortcuts
You can choose to show the Accessibility Controls to your users. For a new project the controls are turned on by default. To hide them go to the Home Tab. Click player and uncheck accessibility controls to hide them from the player.
Let’s dive in the different controls
Zoom to fit
When the switch is turned on, learners can use the zoom settings in their browsers to make slides bigger and easier to see.
The “Zoom to fit” option is turned off by default. If you’d prefer to start with it turned on, open the variables manager and set the Player.ZoomToFit variable to True.
Go to Variables > Built-in Variables double click the variable Player.ZoomToFit and change the defaukt value from false to true.
Accessible text
Learners can switch between high-fidelity SVG text and accessible HTML text. When accessible text is enabled, learners can use custom stylesheets or browser extensions to change how text displays. For example, they might swap fonts, enlarge the font size, or increase the line spacing.
Be aware that if you want to use Accessible text modern text rendering must be turned on. For new Storyline projects Modern text is turned on by default. If you want to use Accessible text in an existing module you can check if modern text rendering is turned on go to the design tab > Click Fonts and at the bottom of the dropdown menu see if Modern text is checked.
Accessible text is turned off by default if you want to make sure your users can use it from the start you can turn it in trough the variable manager. Open the variables manager double-click the Player.AccessibleText variable and set the default value to true.
Keyboard Shortcuts
This switch appears when learners view the course on a laptop or desktop computer. Keyboard shortcuts are enabled by default, but learners can turn them off if they conflict with shortcuts in browser extensions or other apps.
Keyboard shortcuts are turned on by default in Storyline 360. There is no variable to disable them.
In a published course a user can click SHIFT + ? to see which keyboard shortcuts are available in the e-learning.
The following shortcuts are available:
A user can tab trough the player controls and there are several other shortcuts to operate the storyline player. For the seekbar a user can use the following shortcuts:
- Spacebar: Plays and pauses the timeline; replays the slide when the timeline has ended
- Home/End: Jumps to the beginning or the end of the timeline
- Arrows: Jumps backward or forward in 0.1-second increments
- Page Up/Page Down: Jumps backward or forward in 1-second increments
For the audio toggle a user there are the following shortcuts available:
- Enter/Spacebar: Toggles audio on and off
- Home: Mutes audio
- End: Jumps to max volume
- Arrows/Page Up/Page Down: Adjusts volume in 10% increments
This was the first video in a series on how to build more accessible e-learning with Articulate Storyline. See you in the next video.
