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CP4 does not work with Screen Readers

forums_noreply@adobe.com — Sat, 14 Feb 2009 22:51:13 GMT

I'm using IE7 and CP4. I'm trying to get JAWS or Window Eyes to correctly read the accessibility text placed on the slide properties. Window Eyes can read the first slide fine, however, it will not read any others. JAWS will not read any accessibility text for a slide. It will read alternative text for text buttons if you tab through the slide elements. I have the obvious "Enable Accessibility" checked on the project properties.... and YES I'm publishing to HTML... and YES I have tried the other following suggestions to no avail:

JAWS disables keyboard navigation in Flash movies

Post by David Mozealous

JAWS Keystrokes

Nothing seems to work. This is a serious issue that the professional E-Learning community has been frustrated with since CP1. Where are the accessible examples from the Adobe Team? They not only claim CP is 508 compliant, but state that

quote:

Adobe Captivate leverages the accessibility of Adobe Flash® Player software to communicate with screen readers such as Window-Eyes from GW Micro, JAWS from Freedom Scientific, and other assistive technologies.

Article Found Here.

CP developers/designers should not be forced to try and figure this out themselves. How are we supposed to create content for government agencies when touted features do not work as advertised? Rick? Larry? Can someone shed some light as to what's going on here? Maybe talk to the Dev team?

AIR 2.6 HTML Component and window.close()

forums_noreply@adobe.com — Thu, 09 Jun 2011 02:42:55 GMT

I've got an AIR desktop app that is displaying conent via the HTML component. I'd like for the user to click a button on the html page that does a window.close(); to close the main window... exiting the app.

I've subclassed the HTMLHost class and overrided the windowClose() method:

override public function windowClose():void 
     { 
     htmlLoader.stage.nativeWindow.close(); 
     }

This seems to work well for closing pop-up windows, but not the main window. How do I close the main window from JS?

Thanks,

Jim Leichliter

How Adobe Is Strong-Arming Customers Into Subscription Plans

forums_noreply@adobe.com — Sat, 09 Feb 2013 23:57:32 GMT

If you’ve purchased the boxed version of Adobe Captivate 6 or the eLearning Suite 6, you probably didn’t realize that Adobe was going to withhold critical updates and bug fixes from you unless you were a subscription customer, or a company with an ASA plan (Adobe Software Assurance). In fact, this change in “policy” was done in the middle of current release and aggrivated many loyal paying customers. Are you one of those customers?

CC pauses while audio still plays on

forums_noreply@adobe.com — Tue, 03 Jul 2012 19:01:06 GMT

I'm seeing this behavior in CP6:

1) In 5.5 if you have a slide with narration, and CC and a pause object (button, clickbox), the playbar would pause at the set pause point, but the slide audio and CC would continue to play and display in a sync’d manner

2) In CP6, with the same setup, it appears the CC pauses with the regular timeline even as the audio continues to play.

Can anyone confirm this issue and/or know of any work arounds?

Jim Leichliter

Need Beta Testers

forums_noreply@adobe.com — Tue, 07 Aug 2012 13:08:24 GMT

I'm looking for a few beta testers for the new Web Page Widget who have Captivate 6 and an iOS device (iPad). This new version will support both swf/htm output and HTML5 output. You will be given a series of tasks to perform and feedback is required. If you'd like to participate, please email me at Jim AT Captivate Dev dot com. You will be given the premium version of the widget once testing is complete.

FP 5.5 Code Editor turns grey

forums_noreply@adobe.com — Wed, 13 Jun 2012 18:56:01 GMT

From time to time, the Flash code editor will turn all grey and I cannot see my code. If I resize the window to something ridiculously small, it will appear again.

Grey Screen:

Shrunken Screen... not code will display:

Anyone know why this is happening? It's driving me INSANE!!!!!

TIA,

Jim Leichliter

Button Text - Shortcut Keys & 508 Compliance

forums_noreply@adobe.com — Tue, 14 Feb 2012 17:00:33 GMT

In Captivate 4, you could place an ampersand in the button text and at runtime, the character that came after the ampersand was underlined.

At Runtime:

This was useful for letting users know what shortcut key was associated with the button since the shortcut key would be underlined. I'd like to keep this feature for 508 compliance, but as far as I can tell, it's missing from Captivate 5.x. I'm upgrading Cp 4 projects to Cp 5.x and finding all kinds of little anomalies. Any work-arounds aside from using an image button?

Thx,

Jim Leichliter

Flashvars in Captivate 5

forums_noreply@adobe.com — Sat, 18 Jun 2011 01:24:47 GMT

Has anyone had any success reading flashvars passed in to the Cp swf like this?

so.addVariable("variable1", "value1");

This is how Captivate outputs the the .htm file... but I'm having trouble reading the value of "variable1".

TIA,

Jim Leichliter

FREE WIDGETS!!!

forums_noreply@adobe.com — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 04:07:25 GMT

I've developed some ActionScript 3 widgets for Cp4 that I've used in my projects and wanted to share them with the rest of the community. If you end up using them, please post a comment on my blog.

Customize the TOC Expander Button
Video in the TOC (or logo, caption, ..etc)
Use a Variable as the default text in a Text Entry Box
Reposition the Closed Caption Box (Gives you room for a logo or video)
Reposition the playbar and show/hide its buttons

Enjoy,

Jim Leichliter

http://jimleichliter.blogspot.com

Cp 5.5 Quiz Templates - No Likert?

forums_noreply@adobe.com — Mon, 25 Jul 2011 18:13:49 GMT

Anyone know why there are no Likert question types in the Cp 5.5 Quiz Templates?

Thanks,

Jim Leichliter

Captivate Not Handling PNG-24 Buttons with Transparency

forums_noreply@adobe.com — Thu, 05 May 2011 02:16:53 GMT

I've got a problem with the way Cp 5 is handling transparency in PNG 24 images:

I've created a button from a Photoshop CS5 comp that has a drop shadow effect. When I insert the HelpButton_up image as an image in Captivate, the transparency works great. When the exact same image is used in a button, I get the white halo effect on the button. Can anyone shed some light on this? What are the best settings to use in Photoshop to preserve drop shadow transparency in buttons? I used "Save for web and devices" and used the PNG-24 setting with Transparency checked and Interlacing unchecked.

Much appreciated!

Jim Leichliter

FSCOMMAND launching app twice

forums_noreply@adobe.com — Sun, 22 May 2011 23:15:32 GMT

Can anyone tell me why the below line of code launches notepad.exe twice?

fscommand("execfile", '"C:\\Windows\\Notepad.exe"'); //opens notepad 2x - path in double quotes

verses this line of code which opens it only once?

fscommand("execfile", "C:\\Windows\\Notepad.exe");  //opens notepad once

I'm working on a FP10 .exe projector project and noticed this odd behavior. If I had spaces in my file path, I'd want to surround it in double quotes, but that has the undesired effect of opening the app 2x. Since I don't have full control over all the elements in the project, I'm forced to use fscommand in this scenario.

Any insight greatly appreciated.

TIA,

Jim Leichliter

Adobe

forums_noreply@adobe.com — Thu, 17 Mar 2011 17:37:03 GMT

I cannot seem to find the Cp 5 version of the Adobe Accessibility website.

The Cp4 version is here:

http://www.adobe.com/accessibility/products/captivate/

Is there one?

I was hoping to find some info on how accessibility has improved from v. 4 to v. 5.

Thanks,

Jim Leichliter

New Widget: Insert Web Page

forums_noreply@adobe.com — Mon, 08 Nov 2010 00:14:25 GMT

Here's a new free Captivate 5 widget to insert a web page into your presentations. I will be submitting this for the Adobe Captivate Exchange. In the meantime...

http://jimleichliter.blogspot.com/2010/11/adobe-captivate-5-web-page-widget.html

Enjoy,

Jim Leichliter

Please Verify: Aggregator Memory Leaks

forums_noreply@adobe.com — Sat, 22 Jan 2011 00:36:41 GMT

I just logged a bug report to Adobe about this, but I would love some confirmation that some one else can reproduce the problem. It occurs whether it's a .exe or a .htm published aggregator project. I cannot test a MAC projector... but would love confirmation of that as well.

******BUG******
Concise problem statement:
Aggregator produced projects have significant memory leaks.

Steps to reproduce bug:
1. Create a new Aggregator project
2. Add 3 Captivate swfs to the project TOC
3. Publish either as a Windows .exe or .htm
4. Launch the published file
5. Open Windows Task Manager to look at how much memory is being consumed by the newly published file
6. Navigate the TOC and click on each link a few times and watch how that memory is never garbage collected by Flash Player. The bigger the linked swf in the TOC, the larger the jump in memory consumption.

Results:
The browser or .exe file (which ever was published) becomes unresponsive and or crashes after all memory has been exhausted. My guess is that when loader.load() is being called when the Learner clicks on the Aggregator TOC link, that swf byte buffer is never properly released by the flash player virtual machine and that memory is never released back to the OS.

Expected results:
I would expect that this memory is properly garbage collected and released back to the OS thus preventing crashes in the browser or slowness on the PC. This is a major issue and I would expect a hot fix for the resolution. We should not have to wait until Cp6 comes out to fix something as major as this.

Thanks,

Jim Leichliter

Overlapping Audio

forums_noreply@adobe.com — Mon, 29 Mar 2010 12:55:22 GMT

Since I work with folks who are blind and visually impared, I narrate my quiz slides. I also narrate the success and failure captions when they answer the question. If they answer the question before the slide audio is finished playing, you end up with two voices playing at the same time. Is there a way to stop the slide audio when they hit the submit button?

Thanks,

Jim Leichliter

[[DYNAMIC]] in URL?

forums_noreply@adobe.com — Mon, 10 Jan 2011 14:48:02 GMT

I've got an AS3 loader making a Get URLRequest on the local machine (not browser based). The URL being reported back has this:

file://C:\folder\foo.swf/[[DYNAMIC]]/3

Can someone explain why [[DYNAMIC]]/3 is being appended to the URL at runtime? No encryption has been applied to the swf file. What does [[DYNAMIC]] mean?

Thanks,

Jim Leichliter

Flash Projector Interop with .Net

forums_noreply@adobe.com — Sat, 10 Jul 2010 20:53:21 GMT

I'm trying to find a way to communicate between a .NET exe and a flash projector. I'd like to pass parameters back and forth, but I understand that Flash cannot pass params. So I was going to write a .sol shared object file but wondered:

1. How to get to the path of the shared object so the .NET exe file can read it. It looks like there's some random number generated for one of the folders in the path.

2. Once found, what type of decription codec do I use to properly read it.

TIA,

Jim Leichliter

Widget Visibility - Cp4 and 5

forums_noreply@adobe.com — Fri, 22 Oct 2010 14:23:46 GMT

How do you detect when the widget is no longer visible or has left the stage? Widget visibility is affected by the user scrubbing the playbar, user hitting the playbar "next" button, or if the user has hidden it via Advanced Actions. I'm seeing some inconsistencies with the widget visible = true and isWidgetVisible(). It would be nice to have an event dispatched when the widget leaves the building.

I've overridden the visibility property of the widget, but that isn't enough since using Advanced Actions doesn't modify the widget.visible property.

For Cp 5, the only way I can imagine doing this is to listen for the SlideEnter event, then execute the following logic if the slide number is the same slide the widget is on:

add an event listener for the enterFrame event
inside of the onEnterFrame handler, execute the isWidgetVisible() function to know if the widget has left the stage.

For Cp4, there is no SlideEnter event. What would be the best method?

Thanks for any insight,

Jim Leichliter

cpInfoCourseID and cpInfoCourseName

forums_noreply@adobe.com — Sun, 26 Sep 2010 00:47:26 GMT

Can anyone shed some light as to how these system variables are supposed to be populated? I've dome some extensive testing and cannot figure out how and when they get used. As far as I can tell, they get initialized with their default values and never change after that. Are they there for Developers to use when creating a 3rd party reporting system? Or does the Cp Developement team intend to use these down the road?

TIA,

Jim Leichliter

Cp5 - Normalize Audio Across Slides

forums_noreply@adobe.com — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 13:21:09 GMT

Is there an easier way to normalize audio across a 30 slide project besides normalizing one slide at a time? I do have eLearning Suite 2 with SoundBooth. Any tricks folks would like to share?

TIA,

Jim Leichliter

Cp5 playing wrong audio in Quiz

forums_noreply@adobe.com — Tue, 31 Aug 2010 19:02:28 GMT

I have a Cp4 PowerPoint project that was upgraded to Cp5. The project has one quiz pool of 17 questions. I narrate the quiz questions for accessibility purposes. When previewed in Cp5, the audio for another quiz slide plays. They don't match up. It's as if the randomization of the quiz pool is confusing the audio that's supposed to play. Anyone else experiencing this? Any work arounds? This did not happen in Cp4.

TIA,

Jim Leichliter

Sending Quiz Results to a Database in a Non-Web Environment

forums_noreply@adobe.com — Fri, 09 Jul 2010 01:50:12 GMT

Has anyone been successful integrating Cp4 courses with a database in a non-web environment? Possibly through Adobe AIR or any other mechanism? Sending quiz results via email doesn't count in this case.

Use Case 1:

Customer needs to track Learner's score without access to any web server internally or externally. Training must be on a shared drive and accessible from multiple client PC's. All quiz scores must be tracked in a database on the shared drive.

Use Case 2:

Customer needs to have courses be installable on individual PCs from a CD. Quiz tracking must be stored in a database on the local machine.

Gone are the days of Authorware! Any insight or help much appreciated!

Jim Leichliter

The Black Art of Widgetry

forums_noreply@adobe.com — Sun, 28 Mar 2010 13:48:12 GMT

For those of you involved in creating Widgets, Infosemantics has a free Widget Factory API that is much much better than the widget templates provided by Adobe. I just used it to create a static widget and it saved me a lot of time. I also think it's more intuitive to use. Kudos to Rod and Tristan Ward for providing this free of charge to the community!

Jim Leichliter

Widgets in Cp5

forums_noreply@adobe.com — Wed, 05 May 2010 17:41:18 GMT

I'm dying to know if the widget api in Cp5 has changed at all. Can anyone verify? Trial version isn't available yet...

How do you keep up with the forums?

forums_noreply@adobe.com — Wed, 14 Apr 2010 19:36:09 GMT

Curious how other people keep up with the Adobe forums. Do you use the RSS feeds, News Readers, Email Notifications?... I'm looking for a way to do this without manually having to come to the website to reply. The email notifications can be overbearing at times and they don't include the history of the thread... just the person's reply, so you don't really have a context of what's going on... which forces you to go to the web again to see the whole discussion.

Any advice is welcome. Thanks,

Jim Leichliter

File Attachments Temporarily Disabled

forums_noreply@adobe.com — Thu, 08 Apr 2010 14:56:26 GMT

Any word when, or if, this "temporary" forum limitation will be lifted?

Thanks,

Jim Leichliter

Community Professional - How do you become one?

forums_noreply@adobe.com — Sat, 06 Mar 2010 01:25:53 GMT

I see some forum folks sporting the "Community Professional" in their profiles and avatars. How do you become one? Is it certification, answering questions on the forum, or both? Or is this some blessing of knighthood bestowed upon the fortunate by Adobe?

Thanks,

Jim Leichliter

AS3 Widgets and AddNoSkipFrame

forums_noreply@adobe.com — Sun, 03 Jan 2010 03:04:13 GMT

I'm trying to develop a CP4 widget and i'm studying the AS3 versions of the Certificate and Perpetual button widgets. Both of these use AddNoSkipFrame. Based on what the help says, it would seem that this is used to tell the pacemaker in CP to not skip the frame passed in as an argument. However, when looking at the code for the Certificate and Perpetual button, the code desn't quite add up:

                    var slidestart = movieHandle.getSlideProps().startFrame;
                    var slideend = movieHandle.getSlideProps().endFrame;
                    pauseFrame = Math.ceil((slidestart + slideend)/2);
                    var SlidePauseFrame = pauseFrame - slidestart + 1;
                    movieHandle.getSlideProps().slideHandle.AddNoSkipFrame(SlidePauseFrame);
                    addednoskipframe = true;
                }
                if(movieHandle.isWidgetVisible() && mainmov.rdinfoCurrentFrame == pauseFrame)
                {
                    mainmov.rdcmndPause = 1;
                }

I would think that you'd want to tell CP not to skip the frame you are wanting to check in your if condition where rdinfoCurrentFrame ==pauseFrame so you could reliably pause the movie. But when doing the math, SlidePauseFrame and pauseFrame are very different numbers. If startFrame was 90 and endFrame was 240, SlidePauseFrame = 76 and pauseFrame = 165. Why AddNoSkipFrame for frame 76 when the if condition checks for frame 165? A similar thing happens with the Perpetual button example.

The help description is a little fuzzy as well. At one point it describes AddNoSkipFrame as "No frame is skipped at runtime." So does that mean once AddNoSkipFrame is called, no frame from that point forward on the slide is skipped? Then the help states: "AddNoSkipFrame

is used to ensure that pacemaker does not skip the specified frame." which would indicate that it only works for the specified frame passed in as an argument.

It would be greatly appreciated if someone could shed some light on this.

Thanks,

Jim Leichliter

Extending Adobe Captivate 4 Text Box Entry Validation using jQuery

forums_noreply@adobe.com — Sun, 29 Nov 2009 05:55:10 GMT

I had a client request validation be done inside of Captivate 4, except, the type of validation he wanted was not within Captivate’s limits. He wanted to validate email addresses (name@domain.com) and employee numbers (nine digits). I was able to integrate jQuery’s validation package and I was surprised at how well Captivate and jQuery worked together. Take a look at the video to see it in action:

Step-by-Step tutorial here:

http://jimleichliter.blogspot.com/2009/11/enhancing-adobe-captivate-4-text-box.html

Source file included with the blog article.

AS3 swf doesn't update variables set via javascript

forums_noreply@adobe.com — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 05:10:55 GMT

Can't figure this one out: I've got a C4 project with 2 slides. First slide has a button that executes a Javascript call:

SetStringVariable("myVar");

Where myVar is an internal C4 user variable with a default value of "Hello World".

The second slide has myVar being displayed in a text caption.

I publish the swf (AS3) and add this javascript function to the .htm file:

function SetStringVariable(n)
{
     document.getElementById('Captivate').SetVariable(n, "I set my variable!");
     alert("my var: " + document.getElementById('Captivate').GetVariable(n));
     
}

When you run the project on the web, the alert comes up with "I set my variable!" but the caption on slide 2 still says "Hello World". Not sure why this occurs since I've just done a round trip with the variable. It's as if C4 assigns the variable behind the scenes, but the UI doesn't update. This does not occur if the C4 project is published in AS2.

Anyone experience this? Any workarounds? I'd like to be able to use the SetVariable function in AS3 projects.

TIA,

Jim Leichliter

Undocumented Variables and a Captivate Hack

forums_noreply@adobe.com — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 17:24:11 GMT

Here are a few undocumented variables you can use.

lmsString = usually says “Initializing LMS…” when loading a course

cpQuizSelectPathTraversed = Not sure

rdIsPreview = In preview mode or not

_quality = the quality chosen in settings, “best”

cpMovieXForEmbededPlaybar = x coordinate for playbar

cpMovieYForEmbededPlaybar = y coordinate for playbar

cpMovieXForTOC = x coordinate for Table Of Contents

cpMovieYForTOC = y coordinate for Table Of Contents

cpAutoPlay = Not sure

cpMovieHeight = Total height of movie as a whole

cpMovieWidth = Total width of the movie

contentLeft = the content is your original movie size (without the playbar).

contentTop

contentWidth

contentHeight

cpHasSkinSWF = Boolean value to determine if your movie has a skin

paperWidth = used for printing

pageWidth = used for printing

tocInitDone = done initializing the Table of Contents

NoOfDependentFiles = if you insert links to external files or insert FLV files, this variable will tell you how many dependent files you have.

File0 = If you have dependent files, this variable will give you the path to the first dependent file (zero based index)

File1 = Same as above but this would be file #2 (zero based index)

playbarPosition

playbarHeight

rdinfoHasPlaybar = if your movie has a playbar or not

m_fps = movie frames per second

m_OrigFPS = not sure

_url = full URL of the main movie

The hack comes in when you want to view the output on screen. Follow the steps in this post to view them:

http://jimleichliter.blogspot.com/2009/11/adobe-captivate-4-undocumented.html

Retake Quiz

forums_noreply@adobe.com — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 20:35:15 GMT

I have a project that has a 5 question graded quiz at the end with all multiple choice. If a user doesn't pass the quiz, they are forwarded back to the beginning of the quiz for a retake until they pass. In CP4, if the user failed and was forwarded to the beginning of the quiz, the quiz appears to be already taken and filled out with answers. This wasn't the case with CP3... it was reset and ready to be taken again. Is there a way to 'reset' a quiz for a retake without having to refresh the entire browser to reload the project? Maybe there's a different way to go about this???

TIA,