Narration text on screen

You might try using the Notes field at the bottom of the slide then turning on the notes tab on the side of the player. This would carry the notes in a transcript. Though I'm not sure this will meet your requirement. If your organization is required to meet WCAG 2 A / AA / AAA or Section 508, the requirements call for closed captioning.

The best way to tackle variables is to dive right in and break some stuff! :) 

A few possibilities:

A. You could drop the narration text into the Notes section of the slide, Add the Notes tab to the Menu interface, and change the caption of the Notes tab to "Transcript." Then the learner can click the Transcript at the top to see the text.

B. Another option is to include a field on each slide with the text for that slide, and have a trigger for the field to show or hide itself based on the value of a variable at the start of the slide timeline.

C. A third way would be to have a single text field on the background that gets populated by the value of a variable each time a slide is started. The textfield would have text in it like "%transcriptText% which means the field will populate itself with the value of the variable "transcriptText." Then put a trigger on each slide that says something like "set variable transcriptText equal to XYZ" - this will update the textfield with the transcript text for that slide.

Option A would be good if you want to have the text formatted with bolded headings, bullet points, et cetera. It could also be easily shown or hidden by the user with no work on your part. Option B would also let you do formatting, but you would have to set up the logic for showing and hiding the field, and dedicate screen real estate for the field. Option C would make it easy to adjust the formatting of the text box (since there is only one text box, located on the background) but you would not be able to dynamically do bolding, or bullet points, et cetera.

There are many other ways to approach this. The method you choose will probably depend on the specifics of your project, interface design, et cetera.  

HTH

Chris

Oops Steve - we were typing at the same time. :)

Thanks, Gentlemen--

For now I'm going to go with putting the narration text in the notes and telling hearing impaired students to click the Transcript tab to see the text. Down the road, I can hopefully come up with a more elegant solution using variables.

Again, Chris and Steve, thanks so much for your suggestions.

--Dale

Hey Dale,

A variable solution should be fairly simple. You can have a variable named CC (or whatever you'd like) and set it to True or False. Then on each slide have a few triggers:

1 - Show layer CC layer name when timeline starts on condition variable CC is equal to True. (this would ensure that they would need to click CC every time they're on a slide). 

2 - Show layer CC layer name when variable changes on condition variable CC is equal to True.

3 - Hide layer CC layer name when variable changes on condition variable CC is equal to False.

Whatever toggle method you use (button, slider, etc.) would toggle the CC variable from True to False - this could be something on your master slide as well.