Questions answered by this guide
- What counts as a course quality issue?
- How is course quality different from accessibility?
- What's a legacy text engine issue?
- Does A11yCheck check for broken links and inconsistent styling?
- Why does a course that passed accessibility still feel unfinished?
What you'll learn
- Course quality is about polish and consistency, not assistive technology
- Broken links and inconsistent styling are the most common problems
- A11yCheck checks this as a separate pass from accessibility
What's inside
Instructional designers reviewing course quality in Storyline or Rise
- 01What course quality covers
- 02How it differs from accessibility
- 03A worked example
- 04The practical checklist
Why it matters
A course can be fully accessible and still feel broken. A dead link, a mismatched font, or a leftover placeholder image tells a learner the course was not finished carefully. Course quality is what makes a course feel trustworthy and professional.
When you'll encounter this
- Your course links out to an external resource, an intranet page, a PDF, or another course, that could move or be removed later.
- You've copy-pasted a slide or lesson from another course and inherited its old fonts, colors, or placeholder text.
- You're doing a final pass before publishing a course that's been through several rounds of edits.
- A11yCheck flags a course quality issue on a scan report.
Example
✕ Incorrect
A "Learn More" link in a lesson points to a page that was live when the link was added. By the time the course is reviewed months later, the page has moved and the link now 404s.
A link that worked once can pass every check during development and only fail later, once a learner actually clicks it. Nothing about the course looks obviously wrong until then.
✓ Correct
Every link is clicked again right before publishing, the broken one is found, and updated to the resource's current location.
Testing links right before publishing, not just trusting that they worked once, is the only reliable way to catch a link that quietly broke after the course was built, which is the single most common course-quality failure.
Best practices
- Click every link in your course before publishing, not just the ones you remember adding.
- Keep fonts, colors, and button styles consistent from slide to slide.
- Remove placeholder text, sample images, and anything left over from an early draft.
- Check that no two slides or lessons share the same title, which can confuse both learners and navigation.
- Navigate a slide or lesson you've already completed a second time, forward and backward. A course that forces a learner to redo a finished interaction, or locks them out of content they've already earned access to, is a real navigation bug even though nothing in it is technically broken.
Common mistakes
- A link that pointed to the right page during development, then broke after a site was restructured.
- One slide using a different font size than the rest of the course after a copy-paste from another source.
- Deprecated or legacy authoring features left in place instead of rebuilt with the tool's current text engine.
- Navigation settings that force a learner to redo a completed interaction, or that lock content the learner already unlocked, discovered only by revisiting the course, not by building it once and moving on.
Practical checklist
- Every link has been clicked and goes to the correct destination.
- Fonts and button styles are consistent throughout the course.
- No placeholder text or sample content remains.
- No two slides share the same title.
- No deprecated or legacy features are left unaddressed.
- Revisiting an already-completed slide or lesson doesn't force a redo or re-lock content.
How A11yCheck reviews this
A11yCheck's scan checks for broken links, inconsistent styling, duplicate content, and several other structural issues, as a separate pass from its accessibility review. It can't judge whether a course reads as genuinely polished the way a human reviewer would, but it reliably catches the concrete, checkable version of that: links that don't resolve, titles that repeat, and leftover placeholder content.
Frequently asked questions
How is course quality different from accessibility?
Accessibility is about whether a learner using assistive technology can use your course. Course quality is about whether the course feels finished, consistent, and professional for every learner.
What is a legacy text engine issue?
Some authoring tools have replaced older text rendering methods with newer ones. A slide still using the old method can behave inconsistently. Re-authoring it with the current engine fixes this.
Related Guides
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.
Course Engagement Guide→
Why content density and reading level affect whether learners actually absorb your course, and how to review for it.
The Complete Guide to Storyline Accessibility→
Everything instructional designers need to know to make Storyline 360 courses accessible, with a good and bad example for every check.
The Complete Guide to Rise 360 Accessibility→
Everything instructional designers need to know to make Rise 360 courses accessible, written for Rise specifically, not adapted from Storyline.
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.
Summary
Course quality covers what accessibility does not: broken links, inconsistent styling, and leftover clutter. These issues do not block assistive technology, but they do make a course feel unfinished.
Review your course before you publish it.
A11yCheck reviews Storyline and Rise courses for:
- Accessibility
- Course Quality
- Course Engagement
www.a11ycheck-dev.com