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April 6, 2011
Question

Can Captivate do this? (Scrollable area, etc.)

  • April 6, 2011
  • 1 reply
  • 1799 views

Hi, I am trying the Captivate 5 for Mac demo and really am kind of lost as far as if I should purchase or use Flash for my project. I have the CS5 Web suite, so Flash is already paid for. My employer is willing to purchase Captivate, however.

We are going to be making some instructional videos where some slides will have voiceovers and animations/effects to draw the eye. For accessibility puroposes, we need to have the narration for each slide in text form. I would like a scrollable area that will contain that text. Is it possible to do this in Captivate?

Here is the example that my employer brought to me.

http://www.lean.org/Workshops/vsm_online_demo/demo.html

If you click the fast-forward button to slide 6/9 and view that slide, that is basically what we are after. There is text from the narration under "Slide Commentary" on the left. There is also an area where you can skip to other lessons under "Workshop Sessions" (this doesn't work now, as this is just a demo).

From what I can tell with captivate, there are several things that I can't (or don't know how to) do.

1. The "scrubber" on the bottom left corner to advance/rewind (can be included with Captivate's built-in controls though)

2. The accordion menu on the left, don't think Captivate will do that

3. The Slide Commentary scrollable text area

I know Captivate does a bunch of cool quizzing stuff and is great for learning management systems, but we aren't going to be using that stuff, at least not now. Screen capture is something we are more likely to use in the near future. I should also mention I have Jing for screen capture, but haven't played with that yet.

Thanks for any advice!

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    1 reply

    RodWard
    Community Expert
    Community Expert
    April 7, 2011

    In Captivate, your "slide commentary text" is known as Closed Captioning and can easily be added to a special area at the bottom of the slide for people with hearing impairment or poor English skills.

    The "scrubber" is also configurable on Captivate playbars.  You can turn it on or off via settings.

    The accordion menu is known as a TOC (Table of Contents) and can either be permanently fixed on the side or configured to slide in and out from the side if you need the extra screen real estate.

    Why not download the Captivate 5 trial version and play with it for a few days?

    jumpyg2Author
    Known Participant
    April 7, 2011

    Thanks for the reply! I do have the Captivate 5 demo and have worked through Lynda's 7-hour course on it, so I'm not a complete noob.

    I don't really want closed captions. What I'm going to show is a slide with animations (similar to what you see in PowerPoint), along with a voiceover track. So no video. A slide might have a minute of narration, and I just want all of that text to be available in a scrollable area if someone needs it. Trying to get captions to coincide with the audio isn't something I'm going to be doing.

    As far as the accordion menu (TOC) on the left, I would like to have other elements such as key terms defined for the slide that is being shown.

    Thanks for any advice!

    RodWard
    Community Expert
    Community Expert
    April 7, 2011

    Try the Text Area widget that comes with Captivate 5.  You can insert any amount of text and it will scroll if there's more text than can be displayed.  However, I would suggest that a better solution is to have the scrolling text in a slidelet so that it only becomes visible when the user clicks to see it.  Then it won't be taking up screen real estate if it's not really wanted.  This still seems like a lot of trouble to just reproduce essentially what CC text is designed to do.

    You can add your own items to the TOC if you want.  But what you need is a glossary of key terms that appear on the particular slide, the TOC is not the place to do that.  It's really a navigation device.  You could have a glossary icon somewhere on the interface and use a rollover caption to display the definitions.