Hide Submit Button Widget for Adobe Captivate

[This widget has been discontinued]

I just developed a new Adobe Captivate Widget for a customer, which might be beneficial to other developers as well.

Basically the widget hides the Submit Button on Quiz Slides in Adobe Captivate until a specific amount of time has passed. This amount of time is specified by the developer when the widget is inserted on the slide.

So why is this useful? Well imagine that you have an audio introduction to your Quiz Question. By default in Adobe Captivate the Submit button is visible from the start of the slide and there is no way to hide it. This means that the user can Submit their answer to the question before hearing the audio to the end. Now if you then have audio on your feedback captions as well you would get two overlapping audio streams playing at the same time.

How does it work?

The Adobe Captivate Widget is inserted on each of your quiz slides and the amount of time before the Submit button should be visible is defined. Basically if you have a 10 second introduction audio on your question slide you would tell the widget to wait 10 seconds before showing the Submit button.

Demonstration:

A short demonstration of the widget can be seen here.

What is included in the package?

The package includes two separate Adobe Captivate widgets.

1) The standard Adobe Captivate widget will hide the default Submit Button on Adobe Captivate Question Slides and only requires a single parameter to be entered by the developer (the delay time).

2) A more advanced Adobe Captivate widget that will allow you to define which object on the slide that you wish to hide. This will allow you to set the standard Captivate Submit Button as “transparent” and then put an regular image below as your button. The widget will then be able to hide / show this image instead.

Requirements:

Adobe Captivate 5, Adobe Captivate 5.5 or Adobe Captivate 6.0, Adobe Captivate 6.1, Adobe Captivate 7,8  and Adobe Captivate 9.

Limitations:

There will be a slight single flash of the Submit button upon entry to a question slide if you use the standard widget. This is because it will take a split-second before the widget is able to make the button invisible. This flashing can be avoided by using the second widget supplied in the package, but that does require a bit more work to set up.

Another limitation is that even though the Submit button is invisible (and the hand cursor mode removed) it is still possible to click the area where the button is located and then actually submit an answer. Unfortunately it seems like Adobe Captivate 5 does not apply the event listeners to the submit button itself but instead to a separate “area”, which I haven’t been able to turn off. Whyves from Flash-Factor.com wrote a post about these eavesdropping buttons here.