How to Generate Closed Captions for Articulate Storyline

Closed captions make an audio-based eLearning more accessible and user-friendly. It makes it easier for people who are hard of hearing to consume the content.

Closed captions also make it possible to engage with a learning experience in loud environments or when audio is not available. Finally, it can help people learn unfamiliar words and follow along with the narration more easily.

That being said, adding closed captions manually to minutes or hours of audio can take a lot of time. To save yourself development time, you can use YouTube's auto-sync feature to automatically generate an .srt file.

You can then import the .srt file into Articulate Storyline and get near-perfect closed captions.

Let me know in the comments if you have any questions or suggestions.

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0:00 Intro
0:47 The "Transcript" Approach
3:17 The Manual CC Approach
5:24 Generating Captions from YouTube
11:29 Importing the .srt File to Storyline
12:50 Conclusion

[geancarlovillalobos]

Will be amazing to have another video on how to create accessible captions (tips/standards) Great stuff Devlin, thanks for sharing!

[artibirla]

Such an useful information Devlin... Thanks for sharing.

[newshrikant]

Cool, many ways to import the CC really helpful the way you shared the ideas.

[uclaenvironmenthealthsafet]

Thanks, Devin. This was very helpful!

[flagshipbuilds]

This video saved me a ton of time! Thanks!

[weevie]

The YouTube method might be fine for for a frame or two, but in my case, I have 125 frames that needed caption replacement (ENG to ESP). The hack method I used for generating the ESP captions (which works the same for ENG) is to copy/paste the script text into the Insert/Audio/Text-to-Speech feature, select any auto-generated speaker (and the language, if needed), and select the Generate Captions checkbox.

Then, after the audio track is created, double-click into it, select all of the audio media, change to Silent, then Import the new audio file over the old auto-generated media. This will replace the media but keep the captions. Then, go into the Captions area and tweak the caption boxes to match the audio. It's a pain to adjust all the boxes, but it's not as bad as copy/pasting every sentence manually.

[sneharecites]

Thank you for all that information, Devlin

[JessieCarty]

Excellent tip! Saving this for possible future use :)

[DrivelineMaster]

I found your video when I was looking for a way to increase the font size of the closed captions. It's a little small and I feel it needs to be larger. Can you tell me how to do this? Maybe make a video for others. I did find some of the content of this video helpful but also I learned from one of your other viewers about the audio text to speech feature that I'm excited to try out.

[sandramadariaga]

Hola, gracias por el video explicativo, solo que cuando lo subo a la web, se va la opción de activar los subtítulos, porqué es eso?

[purvanagarkar]

Hi Devlin, thanks for this video. Is there a way to change the location of the CC box in Storyline?

[PacoTabares]

wow, es una gran forma de generar los subtítulos en poco tiempo, gracias por el TIP / wow, it's a great way to generate the subtitles in no time, thanks for the TIP

[KMistryPlayground]

This was fantastic! Is there a way to extract the audio (speech-to-text) from an existing video in order to create a .srt file? Example: published a video in Storyline, now it is determined that it needs to have CC for the hearing impaired. The audio is already in the video, but can a text version of the audio be generated in order to create the CC in either SL or YT? Thank you.

[harshitagosain]

how to create a video with CC that gives an option to on/off CC (device/laptop).

[merchizpuerta]

Hi! I was wondering if is the same just doing the transcript through an app and then introducing them in articulate? Is it the YouTube step mandatory? Or is it just needed to generate the transcript? Thank you!

[tamarchobanyan]

Can I do this and then download it as an mp4 and upload to rise?

[locamusica]

The closed captions always look so tiny in storyline even after publishing. Is there a way to enlarge the captions?

[DannyAlvarez]

How can I enable Closed Captions without giving the user the ability to skip to the next slide?

[okaykayo]

So long winded. For what we pay, I'm surprised that Storyline doesn't have an auto CC generator. Even Linked in posts have this capability.