Articulate 360 - There's a lot to be said about simplicity - Part 2
During my time using Storyline, Articulate implemented a superb new feature to the software – the Media Library. I'd suggest you watch the introductory video here. I was incredibly impressed with what they had done when the library first came out. The ability to see all your assets in one location, to easily swap or amend images (without having to visit slides) was superb…and the team asset library features make it even more powerful. But they weren't done! And this is an example of the power of an agile, iterative approach to software development (that I'll touch on later) that shows how useful it can be for users. Articulate continued to refine and add superb new functionality to the Media Library over the next few months. One update in particular, caught my eye – "Enhanced: Use the media library to add alternate text to assets in your project and manage closed captions for videos and audio clips."
This means that you no longer have to visit each individual slide to check or add 'alt' text to an image. Even better, you can apply an 'alt' text for an image in the Media Library and have that 'alt' text applied across every instance in a project where that image is used (if you want). That is fantastic! I also suspect (in the future) that it will change the way I work on accessibility tags for a project. I suspect that from now on I will first go into the Media Library and add 'alt' text to the items I see there, and then secondly, visit each slide and use the "Tab Order" feature to then do a final check whilst removing or ordering the items that I want a user to tab through when using a screen reader.
Another nice touch in this area is the ability to add notes to the images, such as noting the original source of the image or publication limitations (for example, "For internal use only. Not to be used outside of the organisation.") or comments that would help when reviewing the project in the future. These notes don't get published but will prove remarkably handy for someone working on the file later on.