November 12, 2010

Adobe Captivate 5 – Enhancements in TOC Feature

Table of Contents (aka TOC) feature was introduced in Adobe Captivate 4. It was an immediate hit with Adobe Captivate users and we had gotten lot of feedback and enhancement requests for this feature. We are glad that we have been able to absorb most of it. These enhancements make TOC much more powerful, more usable and good looking. I am writing down some of the enhancements below -

Go to Settings Dialog (Project -> Table of Contents -> Settings) to try out all this.

1. TOC can be shown along side the content or it can be shown in an overlay mode. In Overlay mode, the learner can call the TOC by clicking on a small icon. With Adobe Captivate 5, this small icon can be customized. You can supply an image for this icon. Whats more, you can give a separate image for expanding and collapsing the TOC.

2. Adobe Captivate 5 gives more control on the width of the TOC. Now this is customizable and you can specify the width in pixels.

3. Now you can specify the default state of the group of entries when the course begins. You can set it to collapsed, so when the TOC is shown, all the groups will be collapsed. For long courses, it lets learner to see the contents in one view without having to scroll.

4. You can specify the different Rollover color for entries at each level.

5. You have an option to specify if the background of the TOC entries should be flat or have gradient. This helps in merging the TOC Theme with contents better as contents may not be having gradients.

6. In the TOC Preview (Skin Editor), the overlay TOC is shown as open by default. This will allow you to quickly see the effects of changes you are making for the overlay mode as well.

7. TOC is accessible now. It works properly with Screen Readers as well as Keyboard navigation works fine.

Try out all these new exiting enhancements along with cool new features of Adobe Captivate 5 and let us know your feedback.

Posted by Ashish Garg6:25 PM

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  • Andrew Taylor

    It doesn’t seem that there are many sample Captivate implementations created by Adobe. Why not include a simple Captivate example using the TOC when you introduce it?
    I’ve been watching your series of eSeminars – what confuses me is that the actual “training” videos in Captivate are clumsy, non-interactive and ignore your Modality suggestions. If one of the big pluses of Captivate is effective sound implementation, why isn’t it implemented by Adobe in it’s Captivate examples?
    Sorry if this seems rude or I’m missing something obvious,
    Andrew Taylor

    • http://blogs.adobe.com/captivate/ Allen Partridge

      Andrew, Thanks for posting. We’re always trying to improve every aspect of our products so we’ll certainly continue to work on improving the quality of our demonstrations. We are working on a number of examples to aid in the kind of thing you seem to be looking for and you can expect those to continue to roll out over the upcoming eSeminars as well.

  • Andrew Taylor

    Thanks Allen! I find it hard to learn without going through the motions, which is why I am so interested in traditional “do this” tutorials. I am enjoying your seminars, introducing me to a whole new vocabulary for e-Learning, and I’m a big believer in cognitive therapy (oops, I meant theory…)

  • http://stonybrook.edu/it KP

    Hi Allen:

    Is there a way to limit the table of contents to certain slides? It seems you either have the choice to turn it on or off throughout the entire project but no control on the slide level. I want to begin my project with two slides that explain how to use my tutorial – showing how to use the Table of Contents and playback controls/Closed Captioning. Maybe this is obvious and does not need to be explained to my audience, but we have some learners who will need a brief explanation how they can learn at their own pace. I want the Table of Contents to appear on Slide 3 and remain throughout the rest of the project. Is this possible?

    • http://blogs.adobe.com/captivate/ Allen Partridge

      KP, Yes, there’s a little check box beside each TOC entry. You can turn any slide on or off using that check box. Windows: Skin Editor: Go to the TOC tab (third button) and then you’ll see the show / hide icon once TOC is enabled. You can also create folders etc. and modify the level of TOC elements.

  • Christine

    “7. TOC is accessible now. It works properly with Screen Readers as well as Keyboard navigation works fine.”

    TOC may be accessible but we’ve found some issues that affect its usability. We are currently working on a Captivate 5 project that needs to be fully accessible and we’ve encountered some issues with the collapsible TOC. When we tested it with the (latest) JAWS screenreader, it picked up a bunch of unlabelled buttons at the top of the TOC. There appears to be no accessibility option where we could label them, therefore we decided to remove the TOC from the project.

    We’re using Adobe Captivate 5 for Mac (with latest patch installed v.5.0.1.624) and we’re testing on a PC running Windows 7 and IE8.

    • Christina

      I am trying to do this right now, and while the keyboard allows you to tab through the TOC, I can’t find a way of actually labeling the items for the screen reader. It is very frustrating.

      I also have audio narrations on all of my slides, but I want the audio default to be “off” so that the screen reader voice and the narration don’t compete with each other. Do you know how to do that?

      • Ashish Garg

        Christina – are you trying to put different labels for TOC entries?

        For starting the project with Audio as off, on the ‘Slide Enter’ action of first slide, ‘Assign’ the ‘cmCmndMute’ to 1.

        • Christina

          Ashish- I have all of my slides labeled, and they show up as such in the TOC when I publish the project. But when I use a screen reader to test it, its nothing but empty html and doesn’t actually read the labels.

          Thanks for the audio tip!!

    • Ashish Garg

      Chrishtine, we would look into this. Can you please send a detailed mail to me at asgarg@adobe.com and we can see how best we can resolve it.

  • Doug

    I have a TOC where one slide is selected to be in the TOC and very next slide is NOT in the TOC. On the first slide I have a button that when clicked just goes to the next slide (the second slide). The TOC never marks the status (green checkmark) of the first slide unless I add the second slide to the TOC. Am I missing something here or is this a bug?

  • Ashish Garg

    Hi Doug, if the second slide is not in TOC, then it is counted with the first slide. So the first slide will show the green checkmark when the second slide is also completed.

  • Liz Cooke

    I have some question slides in my project. One of the slides is preventing me from skipping topics in my TOC. I have my slides grouped by topic and I want the user to be able to pick and choose what topic to review. The question slide is a multiple choice and it is located close to the beginning of this particular topic, but I can’t skip to the next topic on the TOC.

    • http://blogs.adobe.com/captivate/ Allen Partridge

      Liz, sounds like you have the ‘incomplete’ option checked in the question. see quiz properties, look for the incomplete option in the PI and deselect.

  • Jennifer Judge

    We would like to start using the Overlay style for our Captivate TOCs, and I see I can customize the Expand/Collapse icons, but we are concerned our users will still find them too small to notice. Is there a way to set the TOC Overlay to be expanded by default?? This would allow our users to see the TOC when they start a video and then they would know where it was from the start. If this is not an option currently, it should be in the future.

  • http://www.infosemantics.com.au Rod Ward

    Just letting everyone know that there is now a widget that enables TOC items that represent branching sections in a course to be marked as completed in the TOC even though some slides in the branch may not be viewed by the learner. This widget, TicTOC by Infosemantics, allows you to specify which slides should be marked as completed when the slide with the widget is viewed (usually the slide where branches merge again). The widget also enables branched courses to achieve 100% completion status in an LMS even though some slides are never viewed.
    More information here: http://www.infosemantics.com.au/ticktoc

  • http://www.facebook.com/people/Julien-Boppert/100001441392857 Julien Boppert

    We have a problem with SCORM/AICC and TOC. After a break (= suspend) the tutorial made by capitvate resumes at the right menue position, but the green marker are away. We had tested this behavior in moodle and our own LMS. Does someone know this problem too?

    • http://blogs.adobe.com/captivate Shameer Ayyappan

      Hi Julien, I think this is addressed in Cp5.5. Could you install a trial version of Cp5.5 and check if you’re still facing this?

      • http://www.facebook.com/people/Julien-Boppert/100001441392857 Julien Boppert

        Hello Shammeer, yes we still using Cp 5.5. Acually we have a secound problem. In a SCORM Export we would like to disable the mastery score parameter. Has Cp an option for removing mastory score parameter from the imsmanifest.xml ?

      • Matt

        I am using CP 5.5 and when i export to Scorm and place within Moodle the green tick next to the slide is gone. Also it doesnt ask it the user wants to continue from where they left off from. It does this if i export to HTML.
        Any ideas?

  • http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100000971240169 Carl Polson

    Has anybody come up with a way to remove the time or overall duration of the course?

  • http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100000971240169 Carl Polson

    Has anybody come up with a way to remove the time or overall duration of the course?

  • Stacy

    I would also like to know if there is a way to remove the time or overall duration of the course from the table of contents.

  • mpj

    How to add TOC to video i.e. MP4 output?

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