How to Fix Text Quality Issues in Storyline and Rise

Overview

This category covers everything about the words on a slide that isn't about accessibility, but still affects how polished and trustworthy a course feels: leftover placeholder text, variables that never resolved to a real value, inconsistent formatting, and paragraphs that ask learners to read too much at once. None of these stop a course from functioning, but together they're what makes a course feel unfinished.

Step-by-step instructions

1. 1

   Search the course for obvious leftovers: "Lorem ipsum", "TODO", "TBD", "[insert text here]", or any other placeholder that was never replaced with real content.

2. 2

   Check that every variable reference (things like `%UserName%` or `{{score}}`) actually resolves. A variable that shows up literally on screen instead of a real value means the trigger or data source that sets it never ran before this slide.

3. 3

   Look for accidental double spaces, doubled punctuation ("??", "!!" ), or a double hyphen used where an em dash was intended.

4. 4

   Check that the document title (Storyline: Player > Other > HTML Title; Rise: course title in settings) actually matches what the first slide or lesson heading says. Learners and screen readers both use this to know what course they're in.

5. 5

   Give every slide or lesson a real, descriptive title, not a placeholder like "Slide 1" or "Untitled Lesson".

6. 6

   Read any paragraph that looks dense. If it's long enough that a learner would have to scroll or squint, split it into shorter paragraphs or bullet points.

7. 7

   Pick one format for dates and one format for numbers, and use it consistently for the whole course, don't mix "3/4/2026" and "March 4, 2026" in the same course.

8. 8

   If the same concept is called two different names in different places (e.g. "module" in one slide, "unit" in another), pick one term and use it everywhere.

9. 9

   Check for an empty text box left behind after content was deleted, these are invisible but can still trip up a screen reader or leave odd blank space.

10. 10

    Read through for an accidentally repeated word ("the the", "a a") — easy to miss when skimming your own writing.

Screenshots

Tips

• Read text quality checks in a single pass at the end of authoring, not while you're still writing, it's easier to catch inconsistencies once the content is stable.
• A course-wide style guide (preferred terms, date format, number format) saves a lot of after-the-fact cleanup on multi-author courses.
• If a variable can fail to resolve (for example, it depends on an earlier quiz score), test the course starting from that exact point, not just from the beginning, to make sure the failure path is covered too.

Common mistakes

• Publishing with placeholder text still in place because it was easy to miss during a final read-through.
• A trigger that sets a variable was deleted or reordered, so the variable never gets a value before it's displayed.
• Copy-pasting content between slides and not noticing a doubled word or leftover formatting from the source.