Make your Captivate movies more accessible

Adobe has a short but useful article detailing how to make your Adobe Captivate movies more accessible.

These are pretty simple (borderline “no-brainer”) steps a Captivate author can easily implement:

• Add a description to an Adobe Captivate movie
• Add a description to an individual slide
• Limit quiz questions to multiple choice, true and false, and Likert scale (short answer and matching question types are not accessible).
• If you use audio in your project, use Captivate’s closed captioning feature.
• Ensure the “508 compliance” option is checked when publishing the project (this option is enabled by default). The “508 compliance” feature automatically makes Captivate ‘click areas’ keyboard-accessible.

I haven’t tested how well the accessibility features work, but it’s nice to know that Adobe has made a genuine effort to make Captivate (and Flash) SWFs more accessible. Matter-of-fact, Adobe has quite an impressive “accessibility” section on its website, providing guidance for making almost any Adobe-published media file (SWF, PDF, HTML, etc.) more accessible.

Read the Adobe Captivate article here.

Related posts:

1. CaptivateController Updated to Support Adobe Captivate 5
2. LegacyCaptivateLoader: dealing with pre-existing scripts in your Captivate SWF
3. Captivate tip: toggling the controller’s visibility
4. Loading Captivate files into an AS3 Flash SWF
5. Assistive computer technology and web accessibility