Click box not responding to keyboard command

[_jon1]

I encountered an issue with one of our users who could not advance to the next screen in one of our courses. The interaction requires a user to press the space bar in order to advance to the next screen. I sat with the user to see if they could duplicate the issue because I could not replicate it on my end. The user had their resolution bumped way down which caused them to scroll within the browser to read all of the information in the project. I observed that in the event that a user does have to use the scroll bar, they will have to click somewhere within the course to activate the keyboard command. Is there a way to prevent this from happening other than telling the user to increase the resolution of their monitor and prevent any scrolling?

Thanks,

Jon

[Captiv8r]

Hi Jon

There are three issues at play here.

1. Keeping focus on the Captivate movie
2. Viewer screen resolution
3. Captivate project resolution

In any Captivate class I facilitate I will stress that you always want to ensure you create a Project Resolution that easily fits within the viewer's screen resolution. Many Captivate authors will choose 800x600 as the Captivate resolution because that typically fits with minimal fuss within a 1024x768 screen resolution.

Once you settle on a size that fits comfortably without forcing the user to scroll, you have won most of the battle. The only thing left is to coax the user into clicking the project at the very beginning to ensure focus is on the movie and not the browser. That's easily handled by inserting a Button on the first slide. This should pause the movie until the user is ready, then transparently shift focus to the Captivate movie where it will then be listening for the keystrokes.

Cheers... Rick

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[_jon1]

Thanks for the quick response and information. All of our courses are developed at 800x600 so I'll give the button trick a try.

[Captiv8r]

Hi again

Likely you will have to accompany this with instructing the user that they really should consider running the browser at full screen to view your content. Because even if you add the button on the first slide it will fail if they click a scroll bar to reposition the movie. This is because focus shifts away from the Flash object to the browser.

Cheers... Rick

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[_jon1]

Thanks, again!

[niamhsile]

As an alternative, I've started avoiding the possibility of scrollbars altogether by forcing the flash content to fit the browser window. To do this open the html file ina text editor. Find the text "Captivate", "800", "600" and replace it with "Captivate", "100%", "100%"  No matter how big or small the widow is you'll see your full movie, with no scroll bars.

This has been a great solution for me as I have a lot of older users with laptops set to low resolution. They were having issues whereby they could not read all the text, or see the buttons on the bottom of the screen and would often not realise they needed to scroll down.

Hope it helps.

[Captiv8r]

Hi all

If anyone decides to follow this approach, please bear in mind that there is always a trade off to everything. And the trade off here is that when the browser rescales the Captivate movie to fit within it, you are sacrificing quality. Typically if things are getting smaller, they become blurry or fuzzy looking. If they are stretched larger, a similar thing happens. Sometimes things look blocky (the jaggies).

Actually, in thinking about it, that's the whole reason for the HTML page. To ensure that the Captivate movie is presented at the Project Resolution. I might think a simpler approach would be to simply amend any links to point at the raw SWF instead of the HTML page.

Cheers... Rick

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