Storyline 360: Importing Closed Captions for Narration and Videos

Enhance accessibility in your Storyline 360 courses for learners who are deaf or hard of hearing by importing closed captions for narration and videos. Insert standard SRT, VTT, SBV, or SUB files—or create captions and subtitles from scratch with the built-in editor.

• Prepare Caption Files
• Import Captions
• Delete Captions
• Export Captions
• Customize Your Closed Captions
• Show or Hide the Closed Captioning Button on the Player
• Use Triggers to Turn Closed Captions On and Off

Prepare Caption Files

Storyline 360 supports SRT, VTT, SBV, and SUB files generated by third-party captioning services such as YouTube, Amara, and 3PlayMedia. Here are some tips to ensure your caption files are properly formatted for Storyline 360:

• Storyline 360 supports bold, italic, and underline formatting in caption files as well as voice tags to indicate which person is speaking. All other formatting tags, such as font and font color, will be ignored. (Use the closed caption settings in the player properties to format your captions.)
• A caption will automatically wrap if it's too long to fit on a single line. However, if you need a caption to break at a specific point, add one line break in your caption file in the appropriate place. On the other hand, if you need to split a caption into two separate caption boxes that display simultaneously, add two line breaks in your caption file. You might do this when two people are speaking and you want each speaker's dialogue to display in its own caption box.
• If some letters or characters in your captions are unexpectedly replaced by symbols in Storyline 360, make sure your caption files are encoded for UTF-8.

Import Captions

Closed captions are supported for audio tracks and videos. You can import captions simultaneously with your media, or you can import captions separately. We describe both options in the table below.

 

Pro Tips:

• You can import closed captions from the ribbon or the Size and Position window, as described above. Even better, you can use the media library to import and manage closed captions for all audio clips and videos in your project. 
• You can add captions to all audio clips and videos, except website videos.
• Storyline 360 automatically generates synchronized video transcripts from closed captions.
• Media content with closed captions displays a CC label in their media icons on the timeline and slide stage for quick identification.

Delete Captions

To delete existing captions, follow these steps:

1. Select the audio track or video that has captions you want to remove.
2. Go to the Options tab on the ribbon and click Delete. (It will be grayed-out if there aren't any captions to delete.)

Export Captions

To export captions from Storyline 360, follow these steps:

1. Select the audio track or video that has captions you want to export.
2. Go to the Options tab on the ribbon and click Export. (It'll be grayed-out if there aren't any captions to export.)
3. Choose a location where you want to save your caption file, then click Save. Exported captions always generate a VTT file.

Customize Your Closed Captions

You can set your captions’ foreground and background colors, font, size, and position, and turn the text shadow on or off. In the player properties window, click Colors & Effects on the ribbon, use the Closed Captions formatting options, then click OK to save and close.

If you're using the classic player, you can choose the captions font. You can also set the font size for all player elements and captions as a single unit by adjusting the Player font size percentage.

Show or Hide the Closed Captioning Button on the Player

The closed captioning button on the course player is enabled by default, but you can disable it if you plan to build your own custom controls or use accessible video controls.

1. Go to the Home tab on the ribbon and click Player.
2. When the player properties open, mark the Captions box to show the closed captioning button or uncheck it to hide the closed captioning button.
3. Click OK to save and close the player settings.

Tips for interacting with the closed captioning button:

• The closed captioning button may not always be visible throughout your course. It's only visible when captions are available on the current slide or layer. It'll disappear for slides and layers that don't have captions. This gives learners a visual clue when captions are available.
• When a learner clicks the closed captioning button to turn on captions, the button will remain turned on throughout the course until the learner clicks it again to turn it off.

Use Triggers to Turn Captions On and Off

If the closed captioning button is enabled on your course player (see above), learners can toggle captions on and off whenever they want. However, you can also control captions via triggers by adjusting the built-in Player.DisplayCaptions variable to either True (on) or False (off).

Here are a couple scenarios where you might control captions via triggers and how to set them up.