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.
WCAG for eLearning: A Practical Introduction
What WCAG actually is, and what it means for a Storyline or Rise course. No legal jargon.
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.
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.
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.
A11yCheck's Review Methodology
A11yCheck reviews a real, rendered Storyline or Rise course, not its source file, using a headless browser to open the published output the way a learner actually would, then runs three separate passes: Accessibility (deterministic, WCAG-grounded), Course Quality (deterministic, structural), and Course Engagement (advisory, AI-assisted). Here's exactly how each one works, and where the line between automated and human review actually sits.
See a Sample A11yCheck Scan Report
This is a walkthrough of an illustrative sample course, not a real customer's course, built to show exactly what a real A11yCheck report contains: how findings are grouped by pillar, what a finding actually looks like, and what the report explicitly does not claim. Run a free scan on your own course to see a real one.
Course Review Checklist: A Role-Based Process for Reviewing eLearning
Before You Publish Checklist is one person's fast pass right before hitting publish. This is the process a course goes through to get there: who reviews what, in what order, before anyone signs off. Use this when more than one person touches a course before it launches.
Who Should Own Accessibility Testing on a Team
There's no single correct answer, but there is a wrong one: no clearly assigned owner at all. Beyond that, three real models exist, a dedicated specialist, responsibility distributed among every instructional designer, or a dedicated QA gate before publishing, and each makes a real, different tradeoff.
Building an Accessibility Testing Process That Actually Sticks
Writing a testing process down is the easy part. Most fail quietly a few months later, skipped under deadline pressure, forgotten after the person who set it up moves on, or never actually enforced. Here's what makes a process survive past its first quarter.
Section 508 vs WCAG for eLearning
Section 508 is a U.S. federal law requiring federal agencies (and, by extension, many contractors and federally funded programs) to make electronic content accessible. It doesn't define its own separate technical rules for what "accessible" means, it incorporates WCAG 2.0 Level A and AA by reference. In practice, meeting WCAG AA is what satisfies Section 508's technical requirement.
WCAG 2.2 vs 2.1: What Changed for eLearning
WCAG 2.2 is backward-compatible with 2.1, it adds new success criteria on top rather than replacing anything (with one exception: 4.1.1 Parsing was dropped as obsolete). Most of the new criteria are things this Learning Hub already covers under other names, target size and focus order chief among them, this page frames them specifically as what's new.
SCORM vs xAPI vs cmi5: What Course Publishers Need to Know
SCORM, xAPI, and cmi5 are the three publishing formats a Storyline or Rise course can export to. They're not interchangeable, each tracks different data and needs different LMS support, choosing the wrong one for your actual reporting needs causes real problems after launch, not before.
Instructional Design QA: A Practical Framework for Reviewing a Course Before Publishing
Most instructional design frameworks (ADDIE, backward design, and similar) focus on how a course gets built. This page is about the moment after it's built, and before it's someone else's problem: how an ID reviews their own work with real distance, across five real dimensions, before handing it off.