Another aspect of keyboard accessibility when it comes to 508 compliance is not losing the focus on the screen. How can this happen you ask? Well, imagine you have a Captivate course that uses the show/hide commands in Advanced Actions to maneuver multi-state objects on the screen. Say you have something programmed where a user presses a button and it pops up a lightbox with more information about the course. Typically when you select a button, the focus field indicator stays on the button selected. Unless you manually put directions in the accessibility text to tell a blind user with a screen reader to tab to the now opened lightbox on screen, how are they suppose to know more information have come up on the screen? Even worse, imagine that you have a close button for the lightbox once users are finished accessing it. When you use a keyboard to tab to it and select to close it, what do you suppose happens to your focus field? What happens is that the focus field disappears and focuses on the main slide. This is a big issue for 508 compliance because this is akin to pulling the rug out from someone’s feet. One moment they were focused on closing a button from a lightbox and then now its gone. This can be easily fixed when course developers such as ourselves take the reins and dictate to Captivate where the focus field should be when a button is activated (if the button they are now on will be hidden once activated or focus needs to be directed elsewhere). Using the Execute JavaScript command with your Advanced Actions, you can make your Captivate courses even more accessible!

Add Execute JavaScript command to your Advanced Action, select Current Window and in the Script Window paste the following:

var elem = document.getElementbyId(‘Insert exact name for object you want keyboard focus on’);

$(elem).focus();

Now as a course developer, you have even more control over the tab order in your Captivate courses which allows for less room for errors or accessibility failures. Happy developing!