WebAIM - Web Accessibility In Mind

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Re: Accessibility for Authoring Tools

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From: Steve Green
Date: Sep 21, 2020 8:46AM

We have done a few projects recently for clients that are using Articulate Storyline, and it is absolutely freaking awful. A recent update improved the accessibility, but it was just lipstick on a very ugly pig.

One client is publishing courses that play in the Storyline player. We can attempt to fix issues with the course material, but we cannot do anything about the numerous issues in the player. You really do not want to go down this route.

We usually avoid making subjective judgements, but the code quality is what we internally refer to as "pure filth". The developer tells us that he can only add buttons, not links, checkboxes or radio buttons. Buttons do not have state, so if the client wants checkboxes or radio buttons, he has do ugly things like updating the programmatic name to convey the state.

Zooming seems to be impossible. The entire thing is made of SVGs that scale to fill the viewport. In fact we have even seen the content reduce in size when the zoom level was increased, because the player increased in size, effectively reducing the viewport size, so the SVGs got smaller.

There are so many other things wrong and things you can't do. For instance, "aria-label" is just about the only ARIA attribute the developer can add. It is a single-page application, so focus control is an issue, and you can't have ARIA live regions even though they would often be beneficial or essential.

I haven't used Captivate, but I would be surprised if it's much better. All these rapid development tools seem to be much the same.

Steve Green
Managing Director
Test Partners Ltd