Make closed captions appear automatically in Adobe Captivate

If you create closed captions in Adobe Captivate, there are projects for which you might want to have the captions appear automatically, rather than waiting for the user to click the Closed Captions button. You do this using the Advanced Actions feature.

First, make sure that the player includes the CC button. From either the Project or Window menu, select Skin Editor or press Shift + F11.

In the lower, left corner, check the box for Closed Captioning. This will put the CC button onto the player:

skin editor

Since the Skin Editor is really a panel and not a dialog box, there’s no OK button. Simply close it for your choices to take effect.

Now to define the action: from the Project menu, select Advanced Actions. In the screen that appears, you can create as many actions as you need (we’re just going to create one).

Blank Advanced Actions screen

  • Start by assigning a name to the new action. In the Action Name box, I’ll call it CCdisplay.
  • Double-click in the first box under the Actions column. In the drop-down that immediately appears next to it, select Assign. That will let you assign a value.
  • Another drop-down list appears next to it, displaying names of built-in settings. Select the first one in the list, which is cpCmndCC. This controls whether the default value for closed captioning is off (zero) or on (1).
  • Yet another drop-down list appears, and it has two choices: variable and literal. We want to set a numeric value, so choose literal. As soon as you do that, the drop-down list gets replaced with an empty text box. In the text box, type 1. (0 means closed captioning starts off, 1 means closed captioning starts on.)

If you make any errors along the way, you can click the trash can to delete the action, and start again. When you’re finished, the dialog box should look like this:

advanced-actions-done-600

At the bottom of the dialog box, click Save as Action. You can now assign this action to an event.

Go to the first slide in the project — or the first slide where you want closed captioning to appear — and make sure that nothing is selected (click the slide background, if necessary). In the Properties panel, look at the Action section (you may need to twirl it open). There are two drop-down lists: On Enter, which is what to do when the slide first appears, and On Exit, which is what to do when the slide ends. Click On Enter (the first one), and choose Execute Advanced Actions.

Since the CCdisplay action we created is the only one in the project, it’s automatically entered into the Script drop-down list just below. If you ever have a project with more advanced actions, you can choose the one you want from the Script drop-down list.

The Action section should now look like this:

action-section

You’re done. Play the project (entire project, from this slide, or next 5 slides), and you’ll see the closed captioning appears automatically.

cc-turned-on-600

You can still click the CC button cc-button to toggle the captions off and on, but whenever you play this project, the captions will be on by default.

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