Another Strange Bug in Articulate Storyline
By this point, people should probably know we love using Articule Storyline a lot here at Pathways, because it really streamlines our development process and helps us with creating highly interactive eLearning modules.
That being said, because we use it in 90% of our eLearning projects, we are also more likely to find more bugs or inconsistencies than the casual users, which was the case of yesterday’s adventure while developing an eLearning course.
To give you a bit of a background, for most of our clients it is mandatory to have at their learner’s disposition the modules in both English and French, especially for government agencies with whom we collaborate often. In the project on which I was working yesterday, the task basically involved translating the eLearning module into French, because the English version had already been approved a few weeks ago.
Thankfully for us, the client translated all the assets and the translation document that we export from Storyline for this purpose, and as we reimported it back into Storyline when it is translated, we needed to reformat the text, and fix the layout (keeping in mind that French content is at least 20% longer than English) while also recording and resyncing the audio in French, if it’s the case.
Usually, the functionality remains untouched when translating eLearning modules, because the language differences don’t affect it, or so I thought… When we developed the English version, in a couple of screens we included hyperlinks that where added to a block of text in different places (much like a website) which work just fine, but after translating the elearning module, even though I updated the hyperlinks to point to French resources, after publishing these didn’t work!
So, what was the issue?
After looking at it for some time and trying to find answers online (unsuccessfully), I noticed something: In the triggers panel in Storyline, the hyperlinks where sill listed there BUT, because when you setup a trigger to do something (open a URL in this case) when clicking text you need to specify which text triggers the action, I noticed that even though the hyperlinks where still there, they were being trigger by the text IN ENGLISH, but because the text wasn’t there anymore due to the translation, they would of course not being triggered!
There isn’t really a straight forward solution, other than deleting the triggers and adding the hyperlinks again to the correct text in French, which could be a bit cumbersome if you have a lot of hyperlinks, which was my case yesterday.
Another option, and this is more for anticipating this issue, is to not put the hyperlinks directly in the text but instead, add transparent boxes or hotspots on top of the text to open the hyperlinks.
This is, I think, definitely something you don’t come across very often and even less if you don’t use Storyline on a daily basis!
