How to Add Closed Captioning in Adobe Captivate and Responsive Design Considerations (Full Transcript)

Speaker 1: In this video, I'm going to answer a couple of questions from a colleague of mine, Robert, who asked me, first of all, how do I add closed captioning to embedded videos within the course, such as I have a video right here on this screen? And the other question he had was, why don't I simply make all of my courses responsive design? So let me answer each one of those questions separately. If you've been working with Adobe Captivate for any period of time, you'll know that the slide notes page is where normally closed captioning would appear. But you can see, actually, on this particular slide, if I go to the previous slide, for example, you can see that, you know, closed captioning is available, and I click on that, and you can see the lines of text. If I resize my closed captioning, the audio window at the top there, you can see these are the three different sentences that are being spoken, and they're right down here. But when you have a slide that doesn't have regular audio, and instead has a video, closed captioning is grayed out. So how do you deal with that? It's actually a little bit hidden, and something maybe that the folks at Adobe could look at is to try to improve the interface so that it's a little easier to discover. But if you click on the properties button at the top right here, and show your properties panel, you'll see a button called edit video timing. And again, it's not very intuitive, but if you click on the edit video timing, this window opens up, and you'll see there's a tab right here. Closed captioning. So you can play your video, and have all the lines of text, and simply, you know, simply input the lines of text to match what's going on in the video. And that's as simple as it gets. It works exactly the same way as the regular closed captioning, you just need to get to it from a different spot. So the other question that Robert had was that he was wondering why I don't make all of my courses responsive design. I've done a few courses, you know, to be honest, I've really only played around with responsive design. But there are a couple of reasons I don't. First of all, you know, with many of the clients, they're still using older technology. So one of the things you need to know is what your audience is using. So the last customer I worked for, they still are using older versions of Internet Explorer on the standard install for all of their PCs. So the difficulty that they face, of course, is that because responsive design works hand in hand with HTML5, it's not going to work for them. So they're still using courses that are published to a flash file. So for me, responsive design really just wasn't an option. The other thing, too, is that, you know, in this particular case here, this course has a series of tabs across the top as well as navigation controls down the side. There's quite a few things happening on the screen. One of the things to remember about responsive design is while it doesn't take too much longer to develop, it does need to be finessed a little bit more than a regular single view course because you are having to look at the different resolutions, the different screen sizes to make sure that all of this fits within that window. If I was to view this on a mobile device, I'd have to reposition all of these items and come up with maybe an alternative arrangement or alternative sizes for basically three different windows. You know, the PC window, which is the default in this case, but then also you have the, you know, slides where I've got a lot of complicated things going on and I want to make sure that that's all there. I'd have to look at it in tablet form and then in mobile phone form as well. And that could, in theory, take up to three times as long to develop. So, and again, because this particular client is really just using an older interface, their LMS isn't, it's not that their LMS isn't capable of it. In this case, it's just simply the hundreds of computers that their users use are still using older web browsers. So you have to keep that in mind. You should really, before developing an e-learning course, understand who your audience is. You need to do that from an adult learning principles perspective, but you also need to do it from a technical perspective as well. So make sure that you're, you know, fully aware of what the end user's going to be viewing your course on. Guys, if you like the videos that I'm producing, don't forget to give me a thumbs up. If you have questions you'd like to ask me, probably the best place to find me is on Twitter at PaulWilsonTrain and also don't forget to subscribe.