Hi, Paul,
I love your videos and I’ve been using them a lot to learn to use Captivate 2019. However, there are definitely some accessibility issues with Captivate that I’m trying to figure out how to work around.
Early in my current project, I have a slide with three Smart Shape images the user can “click” to learn more about the three characters. After playing the slide of each character, the learner clicks Back to return to the slide with the Smart Shapes. However, I didn’t want the audio to play every time, so I used an advanced action to only play the audio on the first visit. However, because the audio is not embedded in the advanced action, you guessed it, there are no captions. Not a great start.
Then I used an accordion interaction to share five different characteristics of something. The learner can click on the title to reveal and play the audio associated with the details. So I watched your YouTube video on “Click to Reveal” interactions with captions, but that takes me back to the same type of interaction I created earlier, and either the audio needs to play every time the learner returns to the choice slide, or there are no captions on that slide.
Finally, I created a couple of knowledge checks with a Smart Object image that changes based on the result of the quiz. I added audio to the “correct” and “incorrect” states of these objects, but again, there is no way to add captions to these object states.
Okay, I thought, I’ll add the text to the notes slide, and if the learner needs to read those, they can open the notes in the player. They could do that in Articulate Storyline. I never DREAMED that Captivate would not include that as a standard feature.
Now I’m frustrated and beginning to think we made a mistake switching from Storyline to Captivate. Is there ANYTHING that can be done, short of completely violating some major design rules by putting the identical text and audio on those slides? It seems very counterintuitive to me to have the industry leader in eLearning design so completely backward in such a basic necessity.
Please advise.
Thank you,
Julie
I’m assuming you are addressing me since I’m aware that I’m the only Paul who makes videos about Adobe Captivate (I could be wrong). My solution is to ensure my slide contains the full text of the narration being heard. For example, with a click to reveal, the reveal should display the exact text as what is being spoken, or when returning to a slide where the audio narration isn’t repeated then I also have a text caption that displays the text that is narrated and triggered by an advanced action.
The fact is that building accessible eLearning often means making very simple or basic training. The really fun stuff I like to create is often not accessible, so I have to be careful what I do for my clients who are very concerned about accessibility standards. It requires a conversation with your client or stakeholder before you build some really cool stuff.
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