Last month, we released a new update for Adobe Presenter 8. This release grants an early access to fantastic new features and is available only to customers on Adobe Software Assurance plans for Adobe Presenter and eLearning Suite (as well as customers on maintenance agreements and eLearning Suite 6/6.1 subscriptions.) For customers not on these plans, these new features are expected to also appear in the next full release of Presenter.

In the announcement post for Adobe Presenter 8 updates, Dr. Allen Partridge talked about some of the key features, like the new audio workflow, enhanced Adobe Presenter Mobile App, automatic closed captioning for Presenter Video Creator, Windows 8 and Microsoft Office 2013 support, and enhanced interactions library. Along with these key features, we also have some interesting new features added to Adobe Presenter 8, which are accessibility support, closed captions, direct option to hide playbar, and ability to add a title at the beginning of the videos created using Adobe Presenter Video Creator.

Let’s talk about these features in detail:

Accessibility support: Adobe Presenter 8 now allows you to achieve 508-standard compliance and expand your outreach with significantly enhanced accessibility support for the learners. You can easily create courses that meet accessibility norms for defense, government, and educational organizations. Watch this short tutorial to learn more about it.

Closed Captions for Presenter 8 Courses: Now you can make your courses completely accessible by adding closed captions to your Presenter 8 courses. You just need to add the transcript in the notes section of the PowerPoint slides and Adobe Presenter 8 will automatically convert the notes to time-stamped captions. Check out this video to see it in action:

Direct option to hide the Playbar: When creating a branched course or an interactive screen, you sometimes need to hide the playbar to restrict the course navigation based on learner’s interaction with the course. In the previous versions, it was tedious to do so. You were required to change some xml code; and being from an Instructional Design background, I know how much we hate to meddle with the code 😉

So the good news is that now we have a straightforward option to hide the playbar for some of the screens or for all the screens. Here’s how you can do so:

Video Title: Last but not the least; you can now describe your video by adding a title or short description at the beginning of the video. Just go to the branding section and add the title, decide the placement of the title, and it will appear on the top of the Intro video.

Want to watch all Adobe Presenter 8 Update videos? Here you go…