Tag: Captivate

Configured the PennTAP Business Presentation with Google Analytics

I just finished configuring the presentation I recently completed for PennTAP with Google Analytics. Their interface has changed for the better. It took me a little while to get used to the new dashboard. It is much easier to navigate…

I just finished configuring the presentation I recently completed for PennTAP with Google Analytics. Their interface has changed for the better. It took me a little while to get used to the new dashboard. It is much easier to navigate between profiles and find different reports.

Implementing the code is the easy part. What I need is a crash course in analytics. I understand some of the basics, but have a lot to learn about how to interpret the data to affect change.

This project stands out a little differently because unlike tracking data for a website, we’re looking to gather information about a single webpage with an Adobe Captivate presentation (26 min 34 sec). I was told that these metrics will be useful for achieving a goal of 1750 participants. There’s a lot to be interpreted by this number. Are we looking for 1750 unique visits for the total duration of the presentation? This wouldn’t account for the person that starts to watch the presentation for 10 min then has to leave to watch the last half of the presentation at a later time. We can’t track individual users this way.

A better approach would have been to use an ANGEL group and have each participant logged into the roster. There may still be time to implement this approach. These kinds of important details should have been discussed at the beginning of the project.

The cost of accessibility

This is a wake-up to everyone looking into transcribing content if you haven’t already. I’ve been doing the work, both transcribing and publishing media with captioning, but I haven’t been on the money end of things before.We recently send a…

This is a wake-up to everyone looking into transcribing content if you haven’t already. I’ve been doing the work, both transcribing and publishing media with captioning, but I haven’t been on the money end of things before.

We recently send a number of audio files to a quality transcription service who charges $150 an hour or $2.50 a min to transcribe audio. At these rates, it will cost us approximately more than $3700 for twenty three recorded lectures!

I’m not hear to complain about the costs since I think that $2.50 is pretty realistic for quality transcribing. I don’t know much about the business. I wouldn’t be able to say how much lower I think this charges could be. With higher demand and more competition, I wonder how sustainable business could be charging much under $2 a min.

The message I want to get out to other online course designers, program managers, and accessibility specialists is can we afford to transcribe all public audio content coming out of the university? Those fees don’t cover person-hours required to publish those transcriptions along with the media. The time to add transcriptions for video takes the least amount of time. I’m thinking 5-20 min depending upon the length of the video and publishing platform. Other formats, like published Captivate files can take considerably longer. How much to you pay your designers and multimedia specialists an hour? Multiply that for each video and then each course or website you support.

Please don’t mistake my post as an argument against accessibility. I strongly support designing for accessibility–what benefits a few, benefits all. We do have to take these costs into account when developing our budgets. I have a feeling that’s not really being done right now.

Using a patch cable to record system audio

This is the method I used to record system audio while creating Captivate and other screencasting movies using software that doesn’t provide drivers to capture that audio. By system audio, I’m referring to any sound that isn’t external to the…

This is the method I used to record system audio while creating Captivate and other screencasting movies using software that doesn’t provide drivers to capture that audio. By system audio, I’m referring to any sound that isn’t external to the computer. More specifically, it could be a YouTube video I’m trying to capture, or a project from Audacity, or even the playback of a segment from Adobe Connect 8.

  1. purchase a patch cable (example from Radioshack)

  2. plug the patch cable in to connect the headphone (out) and mic (in) jacks – I have a docking station that has jacks that I use for this technique; they are visible in the far right-hand side of the image below

  3. temporarily set the playback or audio out settings to the headphone jack (“Speakers / Headphones” option visible below)

  4. set/verify that your system will capture audio via the mic jack (“Dock Mic” option visible below)

  5. record your desktop content
  6. return the audio out settings to their original output (USB headset in my case) so that you can listen to your newly recorded content

I just leave the cable installed on the dock so that I only have to adjust the output source whenever I want to capture system audio.

Audacity is a great tool for testing out a quick recording. Keep in mind that some of the names for the input/outputs may appear differently.

I did test the audio capture and I didn’t seem to have any sync issues.