Keyboard Navigation Testing Cheat Sheet
The keys and quick test every keyboard-only check comes down to, for any course, page, or app. Kept open during testing, not read once and filed away.
How to Test eLearning with a Screen Reader
A practical, no-fear guide to testing your own course with a screen reader, from your first NVDA install to knowing exactly what you're listening for.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Closed Captions Guide
The difference between captions and a transcript, and exactly how to add both in Storyline and Rise.
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.
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.
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.
Accessible Assessments Guide
Quiz interactions fail accessibility in specific, recurring ways: an answer choice reachable only by mouse, feedback that appears but is never announced, a matching or drag-and-drop question with no keyboard path to a correct answer at all.
NVDA vs JAWS vs VoiceOver: Which Should You Learn First
NVDA (free, Windows), JAWS (paid, Windows), and VoiceOver (built into macOS and iOS, free) are the three screen readers worth knowing about for eLearning testing. For a first screen reader, and for most eLearning QA, NVDA on Windows with Chrome or Firefox is the right place to start.