Today was the day… I gave a presentation at the eLearning Guild’s DevLearn 2007 conference in San Jose. Topic? Captivate-to-Flash ActionScript Communication. Not a sexy title, I know, but there was a pretty respectable turnout… which indicates to me that a lot of people want to use Captivate but are feeling quite frustrated with its …
Just thought I’d pass this link on: http://www.assistiveware.com/videos.php (short write-up here — thanks to Roger Johansson for the link.)
These are video profiles of people with disabilities — mild to severe — who use assistive computer technology to improve their lives. Some people use the computers to simply help them with their jobs (such as a blind person who is a professional French-to-English translator), while others use their computers as a lifeline to the rest of the world.
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Armed with a basic understanding of accessibility, and with a little planning, a web developer can create courses and/or websites that contain rich content — even Flash movies and videos — while supporting a majority of assistive computer/alternative web browsing technologies.
Here are my first impressions of Captivate 3’s improvements and new features.
I just got Captivate 3, and eagerly installed it to see if any improvements have been made regarding JavaScript and Actionscript handling. Short answer: nope.
For the last week, I’ve been doggedly attempting to create a hybrid of Flash-to-JavaScript communication techniques for creating cross-browser SCORM-conformant courses that work with almost any version of Flash Player. Today I threw in the towel. Here’s my story.
Captivate SWFs can communicate with the host HTML file via JavaScript, but the scripting options suffer from severe limitations imposed by the Captivate authoring environment.
I’ve been looking for ways to use JavaScript in Captivate. I’m a bit disappointed to report that JavaScript can only be used in very limited instances.
Captivate 2.0 doesn’t include the ability directly manipulate Actionscript. This has been problematic for people like myself who have Flash-based ‘players’ that load and unload both Captivate SWFs and Flash SWFs; we often need the Captivate SWF to perform some kind of action when it reaches its end.
But I found another Microsoft product helpful today. It pains me to say it, but it’s true. I have created an XML template for an online course delivery system I’m building at my workplace. The course data for each course needs to be placed into a copy of this XML template. The problem is that …
OK, most of you probably don’t know the difference between an XML file and an XSD (“XML Schema”) file. For a brief intro check out W3Schools’ XML Schema tutorial. A brief quote: “The purpose of an XML Schema is to define the legal building blocks of an XML document, just like a DTD.” This week …
