Accessibility updates

I am back,

It has only been two years - and in my defence the world has been on fire for a year of that. Plus I don't have a large number of readers do I?

No Katie, you do not!

I was very excited to learn that the December update of Articulate 360 included accessibility features that allow a user to modify the text font and size and change colours. I was less excited to learn that doing this through Blackboard when you publish as a SCORM package was not super simple!

But I have done it.

After you have run your Storyline update anything you publish will have the accessibility tools on the player as a default.

 

As default accessible text is set to off (false). You can change this from the variables menu, built in variables. However, at time of writing, I would advise against having the accessible text on as default as it has a minor effect on the formatting.

So far so simple.

If you are publishing your content for the web - all is good now. However, if you are publishing for a VLE using SCORM there are a few things to note.

1. Articulate support were really helpful, and they pointed me to SCORM cloud as a platform for testing - which was actually really helpful as it means you don't have to faff about deploying things in a VLE.

2. Not all accessibility software is created equal, I think I will end up recommending the free version of helperbird, not because it is necessarily better than other tools but this is the one I got to work most effectively in this scenario (and actually with Blackboard in general)

3. And this is the important bit, as far as I can tell it doesn't work if you set your player to open in 'frameset’. The best option I have found is

SCO launch = new window

Player launch = frameset.

(this can all be tested easily in SCORM Cloud)




On the one hand this is good because the default is new window. On the other hand, I prefer to use 'frameset' as it gets around the pop-up window (and it being blocked by internet settings etc)