Storyline Example: Generating Closed Captions

Jun 27, 2012

One of the complaints I've seen with Storyline's accessibility is the challenge of adding Closed Captions. There are a few ways to accomplish this in Storyline but most of the methods I've seen in practice make it difficult to separate the caption from the presentation. In other words, folks are putting text boxes on the slide to time the text. 

Here's a way to add CC to your presentations that is fast and easy - with the bonus of providing a toggle control to show or hide the CC and centralized styling and position of the display from a single object.

Take a look. The file is pretty self-explanatory, it employs relatively simple concepts with decent results. It's pretty easy to manage.

Story source file

Demonstration

176 Replies
Steve Flowers

The CC and toggle button are both part of the master in this case. To add a toggle button / tab to the player you'll have to pulse through a JavaScript trigger to change a variable since, at the moment, adjust variable isn't available in the trigger list for tabs.

I'm using this trigger to open a help overlay:

var player=GetPlayer();

player.SetVar("helpTrigger",true);

You should be able to use something like this to force a variable change and toggle a variable every time the external pulse is pushed in through JavaScript. It's sure to change the variable on every tab click event:

var player=GetPlayer();

var currentTime=new Date();

player.SetVar("toggleTrigger",currentTime.getTime());

Just listen to toggleTrigger and change a true / false variable to control the visibility of the cc overlay.

Joyce Hensen

This looks like a great way to get the narration to display at the right time instead of having way too much stuff in the notes panel and risking people reading the notes and missing the on screen activity.  Unfortunately I'm really a novice at Storyline, and not a programer, so I'm having some trouble figuring out how this works in the story file.  I see that it does, but I don't understand how the little blue CC boxes that are off to the left of the screen correspond with the cc text seen on the timeline.  Any chance you could walk us through with a screen recording?

Rebecca Fleisch Cordeiro

Wow, Steve! I've been playing with this also. It's so very cool. I do have a question (you probably knew that ;-()

I'm new to triggers and variables, so it took me a while to "get" what you'd done with the rectangles. I understood why they were offstage; I understood positioning things on the timeline for different entrances and exits; I've used that same process before, but I didn't know where the text went. Finally, after poking around, I got it.

But my question is, how would I ever know to do that? How did you know to come up with that?

What does Value stand for when it's blank as it was here (so that we were able to type our text in)?

What does the Operator =Assignment and =NOT assignment mean? I understand what they're doing here; and in fact they're doing the opposite for me, since I have the transcript layer turned on by default.

I said in another thread, I feel like this is a brand new language and like most language learners, I understand it when I see/hear it, but I have difficulty creating novel constructions.

Probably too many questions for most community members. :-(

Mike Collins

Hi Steve

This template is brilliant. I needed to add captions to a video that had an audio commentary but no captions / subtitles. I'm now able to publish videos with these. To all I'd strongly recommend following the link on previous posts to the short video Steve posted on how to get the best out of this template.

Next time you're in the UK, I'll buy you a pint or three!

Cheers, Mike.

Stephanie Case

This is great, Steve! Thanks for the info and instructions.

I have one question, though, about adding cue points. I have my screencast on one slide and now I'm trying to put in cue points for the video. When I play the slide, though, in Storyline (not Preview or Publish but in the slide editing mode), I don't see the video actually playing so I can't determine where to set my cue points. Is anyone else having this problem? When I pause the video, it shifts the video to show where it stopped but I can't get it to play for me so I can place my cue points. Does this make sense?

Any help would be appreciated!

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