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Learn Storyline, Rise, and accessibility

Plain-English guides and checklists for accessibility, course quality, and course engagement. Written for instructional designers. No signup required.

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New to eLearning accessibility?

Start with a Quick Checklist for a fast pass through your course, then read the full Guide when a check needs more explanation.

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Before You Publish Checklist

A short checklist to run through before you publish any Storyline or Rise course. It covers accessibility, course quality, and course engagement in one pass.

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Alt Text Guide

Alt text is a short written description of an image that a screen reader reads aloud in its place. Write what the image communicates, not what it looks like, and keep it under about a sentence.

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Keyboard Navigation Guide

Keyboard navigation means every interactive object in your course, buttons, links, quiz answers, layers, can be reached and used with Tab, Shift+Tab, Enter, and arrow keys alone, with no mouse required.

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Focus Order Guide

Focus order is the order Tab moves through a slide's interactive elements. It should match the order things appear on screen, and it's checked by pressing Tab and watching where focus lands each time.

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Color Contrast Guide

Normal-sized text needs a contrast ratio of at least 4.5 to 1 against its background, and large text needs at least 3 to 1. This is checked with a contrast checker tool, not a visual guess.

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WCAG for eLearning: A Practical Introduction

What WCAG actually is, and what it means for a Storyline or Rise course. No legal jargon.

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WCAG for Storyline

WCAG's requirements map onto specific Storyline settings: turn on the built-in accessibility toggle first, then add alt text, captions, and fix tab order yourself, none of that happens automatically.

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WCAG for Rise

Rise handles more accessibility structure automatically than Storyline, no toggle to find, but that doesn't make a Rise course automatically accessible. Alt text, captions, and a few interaction types still need your own work.

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Course Quality Guide

What course quality means beyond accessibility: broken links, inconsistent styling, and structural problems that make a course feel unpolished.

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Course Engagement Guide

Why content density and reading level affect whether learners actually absorb your course, and how to review for it.

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Text Clipped Guide: Why Text Gets Cut Off and How to Fix It

Text gets clipped when a fixed-size text box doesn't grow to match zoomed-in text, so words are cut off at the box's edge. Here's how to fix it in Storyline and Rise.

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Accessible Names Guide

What an accessible name is, why "Click here" fails, and how to write clear names for buttons and controls in Storyline and Rise.

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Tap Target & Button Size Guide

How big a button or tap target needs to be, and how to fix ones that are too small or too close together, in Storyline and Rise.

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Closed Captions Guide

The difference between captions and a transcript, and exactly how to add both in Storyline and Rise.

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Table Structure Guide

A data table needs its header row (or column) explicitly marked as a header, not just styled to look like one, so a screen reader can announce which column or row each cell belongs to as a learner moves through it.

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Media Controls Guide

Anything that plays sound or motion automatically, background audio, an auto-playing video, a looping animation, needs a way for the learner to pause, stop, or control it. Audio that autoplays for more than 3 seconds needs a pause, stop, or volume control under WCAG.

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Heading Structure Guide

A heading needs to be a real heading, marked as one in your authoring tool, not just text styled to look big and bold. That's what lets a screen reader user jump directly between headings to navigate a course, the same way a sighted learner skims a page by its headings.

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What Can A11yCheck Review Automatically?

A11yCheck's automated scan reliably detects structural and technical accessibility issues, like missing alt text, low contrast, and broken keyboard access, but it can't judge instructional quality, learning objectives, or whether an image's description is actually accurate. Here's exactly where that line sits.

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A11yCheck vs. Built-In and Generic Accessibility Checkers

Storyline's built-in Accessibility Checker (added May 2025) and generic web tools like WAVE and axe each catch real issues, but neither reviews Rise, neither combines accessibility with course quality and engagement, and neither understands eLearning-specific structure. Here's exactly what each tool does well, and where A11yCheck fits.

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Storyline vs. Rise: Which Is More Accessible by Default

Rise is more accessible out of the box because its native blocks handle structure and keyboard access automatically, but it has real gaps of its own: drag-and-drop interactions aren't accessible, and button and tab text always renders in all caps with no way for a course author to change it. Storyline gives full control, which means nothing is accessible by accident, every setting and every tab order has to be deliberately configured.

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