The course player is designed with 3 main areas: the banner at the top, the main content area and the navigation and a footer at the bottom of the player window. The banner contains information about the course and the current location within it (if the author has chosen to provide that information there) as well as a menu to access additional player capabilities such as:
SMSG Readiness is committed to making products that are accessible and usable by all people, including those with disabilities. If you encounter issues with using this course or have ideas on how to improve the accessiblity of the course, please email APS Help
All actionable items in the player or content pages should support receiving the focus and be part of the tab order. In addition, the player provides several keystroke combinations to allow users to navigate without the use of a mouse. The table below contains the list of supported keyboard shortcuts. Screen reader users may be required to instruct the screen reader to pass the keystrokes through to the browser to overcome any conflict with the screen reader keyboard shortcuts.
Player Feature | Keyboard Shortcut |
---|---|
Play or Pause Audio and Video | CTRL + ALT + P |
Navigate to Previous Page | CTRL + ALT + B |
Navigate to Next Page | CTRL + ALT + N |
Turn on Accessible Mode for drag and drop | CTRL + ALT + A |
Send Focus to the Content Area | CTRL + ALT + K |
Close a Modal Dialog (for example Help) | Esc |
Make a choice in an Assessment Question | Spacebar |
The player has implemented a visually hidden area at the top of each content page to provide screen reader users hints regarding the content on the page and what is expected to complete the page. This visually hidden may also contain the relevant portions of the content from the page re-organized to eliminate the need to navigate around the page to activate visual elements. It also includes shortcut links to assist with navigation through the course.
The player was implemented using an approach that will automatically resize the fonts as the browser window size increases. To increase font size, hit the F11 key to go full screen. To further increase font size you may also increase the browser zoom level (this may cause scroll bars to appear).
All instances of audio and video are capable of providing either closed captions or a transcript (or both). Audio player captions are on automatically. Use the transcript button on the audio player to open a transcript window for page audio. Use the video player's closed caption or transcript button to use those capabilties when video is playing.
Content authors are responsible for providing alternate text for images used in the course. All images used as buttons by built-in course functions have alternate text to indicate their purpose.
Some courses require that you go through the course in a specific order. In order to accomplish this, authors can enable a linear navigation restriction to force users to go through the pages in order.
When linear navigation is in place, you need to complete each page entirely prior to moving forward. If you try to navigate away from a page before that page tells the course it is done, you will see an error telling you to finish the page. What you need to do will vary based on the page you are on:
There are a variety of ways to complete training, depending on how the author configured the training. The simple answer is you need to complete all the required pages in the course. What those required pages are can vary depending on what the author chooses to use.
If the course contains a test out option, you have a chance to take the test out and if you pass, you are given credit for the course. If you do not pass (typically getting an 80% or better), then you will need to complete the training. You're opportunity to test out ends as soon as you enter the training, so if you want to try go to the test out from the Welcome Screen before starting the course.
If the course has a test at the end, you may need to be meet a passing level (typically 80%) to complete the training. The author has control over how many times you can retry the test, so if you do not pass right away, you should be able to retry unless you have used up all of our attempts.
Your course may have a button on the last page to get credit for completing the course. If you get to the last page in the course and do not see that button, you may not have finished the entire course.
Some pages are done as soon as they load. Others expect you to do something like click a box, drag some things around the screen or answer a question correctly. If you get to the end of training and are still incomplete, go back and make sure you have completed each of the required pages.
The Audio/Video Player provide the ability to:
We try our best to give everyone a good playback experience for video, but it's not always easy. There are many factors that go into having a good experience with media (including having good media to start with). Assuming the video itself isn't choppy, you can try the following:
The page loads, there is a box where video should be, but the video isn't playing at all. Maybe there is an error message, maybe not. This could be a video driver issue. Here are some things to try:
This is a good one. You can hear the video, and likely see captions (if enabled) but you can't see the picture part of the video. If you have a taskbar handy, and hover over the IE application in the task bar, you might be able to see the video playing in the little preview that pops up. That's your clue that there is a video driver issue happening.
Some things to try:
The player attempts to connect to the streaming environment and play the video a few times before it finally gives up (actually it's 5 times, but who's counting). The screen you see is a result of it's inability to do something with that video, but at this point we can't be sure what the issue is.
Here are some things to try:
Don't get mad, but we have to rule out the obvious:
Many courses include question(s) and/or assessments based on the objectives for part or all of the course. After answering a question, you may receive immediate feedback on your selection. Click Next question to go to the next question. Be sure you complete all assessments within a course.
The course is designed to work best at nearly any resolution, but you need to have your browser zoom level set to 100%. If you have your browser set to more than 100%, you can lower it in one of the following ways:
The course is designed scale up text and content as the browser gets bigger, so if you switch to full screen mode for the browser you can increase the size of everything. The easiest way to do that is:
To exit full screen mode, hit the ESC key.
This can be a bit complicated. The player doesn't require plug-ins, unless of course it requires plug-ins, then you need them. The player is designed to use as few plug-ins as possible to provide the greatest support across different Windows OS versions. In order to support things like being embedded in a Windows 8 application or played in the IE10 Modern browser, media playback is done through HTML5 video if possible. However, in order to support things like IE8 (which doesn't support HTML5 video tags), we need Silverlight to play media. Content authors also may have added content that requires other plugins (although in courses destined for Learning Central this is technically prohibited), and if they have added Silverlight or Flash content you'll need to have whatever they require.
With that in mind, the basic information about what we require or have tested against is below.
For optimum viewing set screen resolution to 1024 by 768 or higher, zoom at 100% or lower.
OS | Browser |
---|---|
Windows 8.1 | IE11 (classic and modern), FF17+, Chrome 22+ |
Windows 10 | Edge, IE11, Chrome 22+, FF17+ |
Mac | Safari 10.5+, FF17+ |
Microsoft® Silverlight 4.0 or above. Download the latest version
This course was built using Access Point Studio version 9.0.
Access Point Studio is a Microsoft course authoring tool used to build standards based online course content. Access Point is able to provide SCORM 1.2 conformant courseware (or courses that are deployed simply to a web-site, USB drive or other form) that contains a wide variety of content, including rich media, interactive pages and assessments.