Hi Paul,
Huge fan, BTW. Without you and Lilybiri, I would be lost.
Your video is a great intro to manual captioning. But I am seeking the holy grail of captioning - having Captivate automagically create and time its own closed captions.
This is beyond Captivate at the moment. So the next approach is to use the technique described by TLCMediaDesign and take a VTT file, an HTML file and an MP4 file. smash them all together and insert the zip file as an HTML Animation object in a Captivate project.
I am still working on the nuances of this approach. A coworker grabbed the idea and ran with it, I am still catching up. The idea works well enough, but what is lacking is timing. The HTML Animation approach does not allow for variable timing. Getting a VTT transcript from Transcribe, for example (the transcribing service I am using here for this) requires that pre-determine the time hack duration: 1 second, 5 seconds, up to 999 seconds. But obviously each slide and section of that slide is not going to fall neatly into these pre-set time groups.
In my ultimate state vision, I would like to be able to play the MP4 file and mark the time hacks that inticate when the next caption appears, and then have Captivate or another tool, generate the VTT file with the specific time cues. Alternately, perhaps have a continuous scrolling CC window - and this may be the easiest approach to implement.
The group I am in has a mandate for all eLearning to have closed captions. And this is a good requirement. Accessibility is no longer a nice add-on. BUT.... the creation of captions - from voice to text, correcting the text, timing the text, is time consuming. An alternate, having a service manually time a VTT for importation, is (for our department) expensive and we have not line-itemed the cost for this in our budget.
As some of these presentations extend for two hours (I know... we are working on that....) captioning is taking up a larget chunk of overall development time.
Don
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