Concerned about Closed Captioning not working on Under Button audio. How to address accessibility?

Report · Feb 12, 2018

I am using Captivate 8 because my client is a little behind, but they are government affiliated and need to be section 508 compliant. Of course Captivate has always been the leading standard when it comes to elearning and accessibility for all users, but in this course, there are quite a few "Click to learn more" slides where audio plays and only some onscreen text shows up for flavor. Closed Captioning works for main slide audio, not audio played through an action. Is there anything I can do? Perhaps make "Notes" accessible to the learner? I can't see how to make that happen in the settings. I could, of course, make a new slide for every onscreen button, but that is extremely inconvenient (this thing is due for review on Wednesday - no time either!).

I know I'm not the only one who has come across this. What have others done? Ideas?

Thanks so much!

Report · Feb 13, 2018

If you were in 9 or above, it would be a bit easier to replicate CC, unfortunately. (I'm imagining an advanced action that not only plays the audio when the button is clicked, but also shows/hides captions that look like the CC using the "delay" option that was new in 9).

I don't think there's a way to make "notes" accessible to the user automatically, unfortunately. The simplest method I can think of is using an advanced action to play the audio and show a caption (or a scrolling text interaction, if there's a lot of text) when you click the button.

You might be able to get a bit fancier and set the extra caption to show only if the user has activated CC by making the advanced action conditional (if cpCmndCC = 1, show Caption).

Report · Feb 14, 2018

WHy do you need CP9 or CP2017 for this workflow? Using Advanced actions and text containers is also possible in previous versions.

Report · Feb 14, 2018

Oh, sorry, I wasn't clear. I meant that I didn't think specifically showing/hiding the captions with "delay" to perfectly mimic closed captions was possible in 8. (If the audio clips are long, ideally one wouldn't show all the text all at once, but could split it up and sync it up to the audio with "delay.")

I guess I should've stuck to simply explaining show/hide.

Lauren- I know you mentioned not wanting to make a new screen for each button because of time constraints, but to be honest it also sounds like the easiest way in 8, since it would let you have an individual slide for each button and use the closed caption feature for the audio. Plus, it would be easier to "disable" the other buttons (just have them do nothing on those screens), so that would fix your other issue of wanting to prohibit users from interacting while the audio is playing.

Report · Feb 14, 2018

If you are talking about the 'Delay next actions' command, this is indeed only possible since 9.

May I add some warning about that command: it cannot be stopped by a pausing point at all, so be careful. This tip and a lot more in this interactive movie (created with Captivate of course):

Captivate's Timeline

Report · Feb 14, 2018

Yes, it's a shame Captivate doesn't have the option to "stop" a currently executing advanced action somehow, such as with another advanced action. I wonder if that would be a reasonable feature to ask for? (I'm not familiar with how advanced actions work behind the scenes, so it's hard to know what would be easy to add.)

I'm very tempted to explore these various options for "closed captions for audio played by a button" to re-familiarize myself with Captivate...