Skip to main content
Known Participant
May 17, 2016
Question

Captivate 9 - problem displaying closed captions in video

  • May 17, 2016
  • 4 replies
  • 8198 views

Problem - After I publish a Captivate 9 project as a video, the closed captioning does not display as you watch the video and listen to the audio.

I think I followed the Captivate 9 instructions:

1 - An audio file has been imported and saved in each slide.

2 - From the Audio drop-down, I chose Audio Management

3 - I chose a slide with an imported audio file and clicked the 'closed caption' button at the bottom of the screen

4 - On the Closed Captioning tab, I entered three rows of text for the slide

5 - I saved and closed the Slide Audio window

6 - On the Advanced Audio Management window, 'Yes' now appears in the 'closed Caption' column for the slide I chose.

7 - I closed the Advanced Audio Management window by clicking 'OK.'

Closed captioning does not appear in the Preview.

When I publish the project to my computer, Closed captioning  doesn't appear when I publish the project as a video or as HTML5 / SWF.

What am I missing?

This topic has been closed for replies.

4 replies

Inspiring
July 13, 2017

Hi,

We're having the same problem. We NEED the closed captions to be visible in our MP4 project. The swf format is not an option as it is not acceptable by many browsers and the HTML5 format also creates .js and .json files which we're not sure are any more acceptable than .swf?

So, is there any way to make the closed captions visible on MP4?

We've gotten this far: We made the CC default visible by creating an action on the 'On Enter' event of the First slide and now our MP4 project shows nice little white CC-boxes - but without any text inside at all!?

All suggestions are highly appreciated

Lilybiri
Legend
July 13, 2017

Closed captions are part of the skin, not possible for pure video, has no

skin.

Inspiring
July 14, 2017

Thank you very much for your quick answer. Of course it is not what we hoped for, but at least we now know that Captivate can't help us and we can begin to look for another solution.

However, I must say that I don't understand how Captivate can not have a solution to this? Surely, we can't be the only ones that need MP4 files due to browser compatibility and closed captions due to accessibility issues? We might need to give up on Captivate just due to this issue

But again thank you very much for your help

Participant
January 10, 2017

I am no techie, but these are the steps I followed.

Creating an instructional video for students...

1) Open the audio file for a slide (I access by clicking open the timeline and clicking the audio line), select the Closed Captioning tab and add lines as needed. Keep the lines short. A great tutorial - Adding 508 compliant closed captioning in Adobe Captivate 8 - YouTube - I am using Capt 9 - the video still applies.

2) Open the Project tab (top menu) and select Skin Editor and check Closed Captioning (not a default setting). A very small X to close the window in the top right corner (hard to see).

3) Publish the "video" as an Executable. 

When the file is open, it executes as a video with a button included for viewers to turn on CC.

The downside - though I had no issue viewing the video logged in as a student,  the video opened in a small frame (readable, but really too small for my old eyes), and I could not figure out how to enlarge it.

jc

Inspiring
November 15, 2016

For my project, I didn't want a playbar (to prevent students from jumping ahead), so I while the project advanced automatically, I did add next (timed to only show near the end of a slide) and back buttons. I also wanted closed captioning to show throughout.

Because I wanted the cc to show and was not using a playbar, I allowed for some white space at the bottom of my slides for where the cc would appear.

I turned the playbar off and on the first slide with audio used an action to show the cc. I also added a pause/play button on each slide (I used solution #2 from this blog Custom Play/Pause button in Captivate - Captivate blog) just in case the student needed to pause the project.

RodWard
Community Expert
Community Expert
May 18, 2016

Did you also make sure that the  each of those three rows of Closed Captioning text were selected?

Did you also then right click on each slide and select Audio > Closed Captioning and adjust the timing of the synchronization there?

If not, then THAT could be what you missed.

Known Participant
May 18, 2016

Thank you for your reply. I see that the second image is from Audio > Audio Management > Closed Captioning. I did adjust the timing synchronization.

But where do the parameters in the first image come from? It looks like its from a section of the Timeline, but I didn't know that the text from your Closed Captioning script displays in the Timeline.

Is there another step that I need to add in the numbered steps I entered above?

Known Participant
May 24, 2016

The playbar is part of the skin for a cptx-project. That skin will appear when you have output to SWF/HTML. But that skin is not used in a video output, sorry.


So closed captioning is available for published HTML5/SWF output.

Closed captioning is not available for published MP4 video output.

Will closed captioning will be available for MP4 video output in a future version of Captivate?

And will the complete steps and configurations for closed captioning be included in the Captivate instructions?