How to Fix Auto-Playing Media and Missing Player Controls in Storyline 360

Overview

Anything that plays sound or motion on its own, background music, an auto-playing video, a looping animation, needs a way for the learner to stop or slow it down. This is partly a course-wide player setting and partly something to check slide by slide, background audio and looping animations in particular are easy to add without ever giving the learner a way to turn them off.

Step-by-step instructions

1. 1

   Go to Player Properties (Home tab, then Player).

2. 2

   Under Other, check whether Playback Speed and accessibility controls are enabled for the course-wide player.

3. 3

   Turn them on if they aren't, this gives every learner a speed control without you having to do anything per slide.

4. 4

   For any slide with background audio, check the trigger that starts it, if it plays automatically with no pause button on screen, add one, or set it to not autoplay.

5. 5

   For a looping animation or pulsing marker, add a way to pause or stop the loop, or shorten it so it only cycles briefly rather than indefinitely.

6. 6

   For embedded video, right-click it, choose Video, and confirm Play, Pause, and Volume controls are all switched on.

Screenshots

Tips

• Course-wide accessibility controls in Player Properties are a one-time setting, turn them on early rather than fixing it slide by slide later.
• If background audio is decorative rather than essential, consider whether the course needs it at all, it's one less thing to make accessible.
• A looping animation that runs for more than a few seconds without stopping is more likely to distract or disorient than to help.

Common mistakes

• Background audio or animation set to autoplay with no visible way to pause or stop it.
• Assuming the course-wide Player Properties settings automatically cover every embedded video, some settings are per-video and need checking individually.
• Leaving playback speed controls off by default, learners who process audio or reading more slowly rely on this.

Why it matters

Auto-playing sound can startle or disorient learners, and without pause or speed controls, some learners can't slow content down or stop it when they need to.