In Adobe Captivate it is possible to add keyboard shortcuts to certain elements in your project in order to ease navigation for the user, or to simulate certain tasks if you are doing system / software trainings.
There is one thing to keep in mind though. Content created in Adobe Captivate is predominantly published as an HTML/SWF project and the end-user will launch the course using the default Internet browser on their machine.
One area where it often goes wrong is when a keyboard shortcut is connected to something in Adobe Captivate, but already allocated to a specific function in the browser.
For example: Lets say that you are doing a recording of your new customer management software and you want to have the student click F1 to open the Help page in your software. If you were to assign this shortcut in Adobe Captivate then it would work perfectly fine when you are previewing the course within the Adobe Captivate previews (F4 or F8), but once you publish this course and launch it with your regular Internet browser you would be in trouble.
F1 is generally used as a shortcut to Help in most applications, which also includes the majority of Internet browsers. Therefore when your student clicks F1 in your course it will be intercepted by the browser and the browsers help will open – The Adobe Captivate project will never recieve the click.
Therefore – whenever you are assigning Keyboard Shortcuts to your Adobe Captivate projects it is good practise to make sure that they are not already assigned to functionality in an Internet browser.
Here is a good resource on “Browser Keyboard Shortcuts” that contains all major browsers.
Note that if you publish your project as an .exe file it will not open in a browser so you would be able to use additional shortcuts in this case.
4 Comments
How can I add a keyboard shortcut in Captivate so the learner can use PgUp and PgDn to go to the next and previous slides?
Page up and Page down are system keys used by your browser and the computer so you can’t assign shortcuts to those.
Is the same thing true of CTRL+V? I want my learners to pass the keyboard shortcut for Paste. Is there a workaround?
I am using CP 7 — I have included keyboard shortcuts and published my content as .exe. My shortcuts worked great in my preview but now are not working at all in the .exe version. My keyboard shortcuts mimic the shortcuts used in software that I am training and are ALT+ keys. I appreciate your help!