Accessibility support
Authors can create a book with an accessible design by using objects from the Accessibility Catalog. The Accessibility Catalog contains ready-to-use objects such as multiple-choice questions, buttons, text fields, media players, and navigation links. You choose objects from the Accessibility Catalog in ToolBook to display your graphics, and other content. As you develop content of this type, keep the following tips in mind to make your content accessible:
- Add a brief description for each graphic you include
- Use a text color that provides strong contrast with the background color
- Create a logical tab order on the page
- Trigger an audio file with a Play Media Player button
- Create a transcript or descriptive text for audio or video files
After you create a lesson in ToolBook, you can publish the book for delivery by going through a series of steps in the ToolBook Web Specialist. An option in the Web Specialist labeled “Convert tooltips to alternate text attributes” allows the text that you enter in the tooltip field of a properties dialog box for exporting a graphic in a format for interpretation and vocalization by screen reader software.
Quiz Summary and Certificates features
Authors can now get more value out of an exam or quiz with a Quiz Summary feature and Certificates pages. The Catalog has a Certificates category and Quiz Summary category that provide these features. Figure 18 shows a sample Certificate page that the learner can print. Notice that the name is included along with the exam name, exam score, and the date the exam is completed.
Figure 18: Certificate page for an exam
A significant new feature released in ToolBook 10.5 is the Quiz Summary elements. The author can create a page and add an entire set of elements to provide a quiz summary, or build the page using individual elements found in the Quiz Summary category of the Catalog. Figure 19 shows a sample Quiz Summary page. Several options exist for building this page. With the options chosen in this example, a Review link is available that takes the learner back to a selected question page for review. Here, it might be important for the learner to review the question he or she missed. With just a bit more coding using the Actions Editor, the author can set up an exam such as this to allow the learner to go back and review one question, then return to this page to make another selection.
Figure 19: Quiz Summary page with one question answered incorrectly
LMS deployment
ToolBook HTML content works seamlessly with the SumTotal LMS (or any SCORM-compliant LMS). As long as a question object is set up for scoring, the relevant question data is automatically sent to a SCORM-compliant LMS when the learner exits the lesson. Using the action as shown in Figure 20, the author can set up a button on the last page of the lesson to send a completed status to the LMS. Likewise, for buttons on pages other than the last, the author can quickly change this action to suspend, and thus bookmark the lesson to allow the learner to return to the lesson where they last left off and continue, restoring any previous question data.
Figure 20: Exit action to mark a lesson as complete
Summary
While it is challenging to cover all the key points in a major product release like ToolBook 10.5, I hope that you have gotten a good understanding of ToolBook’s strengths and the important features of previous versions as well as the new version. I recommend that you seriously consider ToolBook 10.5 if you are in the process of evaluating authoring tools for your training needs—and especially if you want to take advantage of mobile learning.
If you have questions about my review or about other aspects of the product not covered here, please contact me at the e-mail address given in my bio.
