New Storyline Feature: Closed Captions

I have replied to this issue in another thread. Please review. This is a flawed design. I urge your design team to come up with a better way to do this.

Thank you, Mat. You saved me a lot of time searching around for a way to do it.

Hi Steve,

SL360's built-in caption editor feature is in the works.  Right now, you are correct - there are limited closed caption features available.  Rest assured, all concerns you have mentioned are on our radar, and will be implemented in updates.

Does anybody know off hand if you can have multiple closed caption files within the same file/scene? I am thinking of our global workforce where this might come in handy.

Thanks for adding this.

The CC file is for the individual audio or video so one course will have lots of CC files

What I am looking for is the ability to add multiple language closed captions per slide/video. So let's say the course is built with English narration but the user can choose either German, Spanish or French CCs for the same scene.

I have done something similar using a layers for the "notes" on a custom UI without the SL player.

Hi Magda, 

Just one language per course set up using the CC button. As you mentioned I've seen folks use the layers in previous versions of Storyline to show the CC for different languages and trigger that based on an initial selection of the user.

Thank you. Maybe I can also add a sniffer or have them choose before starting the course. All good!

I definitely appreciate the added feature of a CC button in the playbar. However, the process of uploading audio files to a third-party site, generating CC files, downloading them, and then importing them into a SL project seems excessive and cumbersome. I typically have ~50 audio files per project (which I already have transcripts for in Word format) and if I want to use this feature it will add significant time to my workload. I wonder why Articulate can't just convert Notes to CC like Adobe Captivate does?

Amanda - I agree. Since Articulate is on the Windows system, why can't it do speech-to-text using Window's native capabilities like Camtasia (PC)? I did a test using an audio file in Camtasia (PC only - speech-to-text is not available in the Mac version) , generated the speech-to-text, exported the SRT file, and then uploaded it into SL2. Worked perfectly fine and was done in about 5 minutes (not including corrections). If you don't have Camtasia then you'd have to do a hack workaround.

Does this support multiple caption files for additional languages? Thanks!

Hi Dan,

The closed captions will allow for one caption file associated with the audio - but there wont' be a way to differentiate the language or audio file used to trigger a change of the captions. You'd need to look at creating more than one .story file to use different languages. 

Any chance this will be included with older versions of Storyline? Malcolm McKinnon had previously asked and there is no response as of yet.

Not likely we will move to 360 anytime soon but still need a CC feature.

Hey guys, this is a great feature but is there a reason by the captions are eating away 10% of the slide?  There are also issues where single quotes are not picked up, I think this is because of ADA restrictions. I would recommend adding a feature like Camtasia has to remove ADA restrictions on\off. This would allow designers to use captions for purposes other than accessibility like English as a second language, etc.  There's great potential here and I have placed a feature request.

Thanks Alexander for sending in the Feature request! Closed captions are new for us - so we really love and need your feedback on how they're working out for you and what things you'd like to see differently. 🙂

Oh! One other thing Alexander - I think there is a way around your single quote issue.

First, open your .srt file in a source code editor, such as Notepad++.   Change to encode the file as UTF-8.  note, if you have opened and saved the file in a text editor such as Wordpad, the default encoding is ANSI.

Next, make sure to save the file as filename.srt with the 'save as type' designation All types (*.*) and not Normal Text file (*.txt).

Finally, replace the .srt file in your .story file with your updated .srt file and you should be good to go.

Hope that helps! 

Thank you Ashley that sure did it for the single quote issue. I will wait with great anticipation to move that caption box around  ;  )

Yay! Great news Alexander and we'll keep you posted on any other updates or features! 

Hi everyone!
Am I the only one experiencing problems with the font size of my captions. Captions were way too small at first, so I put 175%. Everything looks good in the preview. But once published, both web and LMS, the font size stays very small. 

I will attach 2 PNG for comparison purpose (published + preview).

Am I the only or did anyone find a solution to it?

I am using Storyline 360.

Thank you!

With further testing, I figured out that the font size problem is with the SWF output... :/ 
The preview in Storyline seems to be the HTML5 version, which is also find, even in the published version.

Why is the flash version not taking into consideration the pourcentage I set the player to... 

Thanks in advance for the help!

Hello Cynthia - Sorry to hear you are having difficulty with this. Would you be able to attach your .story file so that we can take a look?

I cannot post this publicly, because it is for a client of ours, but if there's a way to privately send it to you, I could yes.

Please let me know.

Thank you!