It only makes sense that on the 2oth anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) I take time to talk about close-captioning. We have the video of the slides and we also have the audio. But this isn't enough. People who can't hear would miss part of the content, and that isn't fair. Thus I recommend close-captioning everything. It will help you to meet Section 508 of the ADA.
First, remember, we have those scripts. That will be our starting point. However I can't just copy and paste the script into Camtasia. It contains a lot of formatting from Word. So, I'll copy the text and paste it into Notepad so that I can remove the formatting and make some additional tweaks. What you'll see in the Text version of the script is a document that has virtually no formatting except for line spaces. This is important. You must put in breaking spaces to have comfortable transitions from one line to the next. For example, the entire thing starts off with 3 blank lines. The reason for this is because I am not talking in the first second of the presentation. There is about 3 seconds of blank space before I begin speaking and I leave the close-caption blank until I begin.
You will also see 3 spaces between the end of paragraphs and at the end of sections. Remember during the audio section I mentioned that I like about 2 seconds of space between slides? Well leaving the spaces in my script allows me to let the close caption of the previous slide end without displaying any of the future slide's content. But at some point the text file is done. Copy the content to your clipboard and then paste it into the close-caption sub-menu in Camtasia.
The default width in characters is 32. That makes the text of the caption pretty big. I personally like to go for about 42 characters per line of text. Also, you can choose to "Overlay" the caption on top of the video or not. I very strongly recommend not using the "Overlay" feature because it changes the font. It makes the font white in color, but puts a black border around it. Anyway, just my opinion.
The other feature is the "Display" feature. This will allow you to generate both close-captioned and non-close-captioned movies from the same project. If you want to create a movie without the caption, just toggle the "Display" option and render.
The actual marriage between the audio-video and the caption begins when you hit the "Start" button. Be ready for this. This part takes some practice to get good at. The trick is to click the red text at the same instant in which you begin that line. Then you wait for 2 lines and do it again. As you go through the script you have to scroll down in Camtasia. This is where it gets tricky. You have to time your scrolling so that it doesn't occur while you need to click. It sounds easy, but trust me, you will mess up a few sessions before you get the hang of it. Bullets are the most difficult because it is often just one line for the bullet item and then 3 blank lines. This means that you have to scroll a lot.
You can see a couple of cool things as you progress. First, the red text has not yet been displayed. The black text is currently displayed and the gray text has already been displayed. You will also see the cc markers with timestamps on the left side. These correspond to the new Caption swimlane in our layers at the bottom of the screen. Once you get to the end, make sure you have 3 blank lines so that you don't linger on your last line of text. You want it to be blank for the quiz. Hit "Finish" to get out of the CC sub-menu.
If you are previewing the presentation and you see an instance in which the caption did not line up well with the audio you can zoom in on the layers and move it either right or left to occur earlier or later. If there is a big problem you can select one point and trash all of the later ones and start recording the close captioning from that point on.
Just keep in mind that this is one of the more difficult aspects of the entire project.
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