Closed Captions Enabled/Disabled… (Custom xAPI)

A frequent question my customers ask is, “Can xAPI track students' use of accessibility features?”. Yes! Storyline included. Obviously, you can manually add controls with triggers for custom xAPI, like a “D” link to a long description popup, for example. However, Storyline also has a couple of out-of-the-box functions too.

The controls on the courseware player for Storyline packages has five built-in variables you can use as triggers:

• Player.AccessibleText
• Player.BackgroundAudioVolume
• Player.DisplayCaptions
• Player.FullScreenMode
• Player.ZoomToFit

The system variable Player.DisplayCaptions also matches the xAPI Profile template Enable Closed Captioning. So, I'll show you how to use that.

The Storyline player has a Closed Captions (CC) control and a separate menu of more “Accessibility controls”, including Zoom to fit, Accessible text, Keyboard shortcuts, and Background audio. I'll show you how to track when the student clicks the CC button.

1. In Storyline, open your course. In Story View, select the first slide.
2. Create a new trigger.
3. In the Trigger Wizard, change the Action to More > Send xAPI Statement.
4. In the Statement, click + xAPI….
5. In the xAPI Statement Editor, replace the JSON code with this:

{   "verb": {
        "id": "http://adlnet.gov/expapi/verbs/interacted",
        "display": {"en-US": "interacted"}},
    "object": {
        "objectType": "Activity",
        "id": "%Project.ActivityId%",
        "definition": {
            "name": {"en-US": "Enable/Disable Closed Captioning"},
            "type": "https://w3id.org/xapi/video/templates#closed-captioning"}},
    "context": {
        "contextActivities": {
            "parent": [{
                "objectType": "Activity",
                "id": "%Project.ActivityId%",
                "definition": {
                    "name": {"en-US": "%ActivityName%"},
                    "type": "http://adlnet.gov/expapi/activities/course"}}],
            "grouping": [{
                "objectType": "Activity",
                "id": "%Project.ActivityId%",
                "definition": {
                    "name": {"en-US": "%ActivityName%"},
                    "type": "http://adlnet.gov/expapi/activities/course"}}]}}}

6. Click the OK button.
7. In the Trigger Wizard, change the When to Control Events > Variable changes.
8. Change the Variable to Player.DisplayCaptions.
9. Click the OK button.
10. Click the Manage project variables button.
11. In the Variables dialog box, double-click the Default Value of ActivityName, and enter the name of your course.
12. Click the OK button.
13. Select the trigger and click the Copy the selected trigger button.
14. Select another slide you wish to apply the trigger to and click the Paste the copied trigger to the selected object button.
15. Repeat step 14 as needed for all affected slides.

This trigger only detects changes to the CC button in the Storyline courseware player. It doesn't show if the button is on or off. The xAPI statement will say, “Enable/Disable Closed Captioning”.

The parent and grouping in this JSON are generic for the entire course. If you want, you can customize the parent context to reflect each scene and slide, so you can track exactly where the student clicked the CC button.