Problem with Hotkeys in Internet Explorer

Here's a thought:

As an accidental workaround, you can try opening the Captivate file in a new window without the main browser elements visible (Address bar, Menu bar, Toolbar, etc.).

In a quick test, having all that stuff turned off prevented IE6 from responding to keyboard shortcuts that are found in those elements.

For example, with the Menu bar on, ALT+F opened the File menu. With the Menu bar turned off, ALT+F did nothing.

The caveat is that you can only turn off the browser elements when opening a new window via Javascript. This means you must create a dummy HTML page that exists only to open the actual training in a new window.

At work, we turned this into a positive by creating a course menu in HTML that opens each lesson in a new window via Javascript with all the browser elements turned off.

If you don't have a web programmer handy, the fastest option to try this would be to modify the fs.htm template in the Captivate install directory:

C:\Program Files\Adobe\Adobe Captivate 3\Templates\Publish\fs.htm

and change it so that it opens a new window with the unwanted features turned off (after making a backup copy of the original file, of course).

Then, publish your project with the "Full screen" option in the Publish dialog and test it out.

An example of the necessary change appears below.

Regards,
John

I don't think there's any way to block keyboard shortcuts used by the browser.

You can use Javascript to block the basic letter & number keys, as well as a few of the events that are triggered by browser shortcuts, but the list of events you can cancel is fairly short and does not include something like Alt-E.

The classic approach in a case like this is to either:

1) Say something like "In the real system, you would use ALT-E, but we cannot simulate that in this training so we will do it for you"

2) Show a picture of the key combination and say "Click this to simulate..."

3) Show a picture of a keyboard and tell the user to click the correct key(s).

Each of those fairly inelegant, but unless I'm missing something, that's pretty much what you've got to choose from.

Regards,
John