Last month I had the opportunity to visit the Mozilla office in Mountain View. While I was there I had an interesting discussion with a few people from the SUMO team (short for support.mozilla.com) about some of the challenges with adding screencasts to their support articles. Since the volunteer community creates most of the content, it’s not always feasible for screencasts to have narration. Also, if they did, they’d somehow have to be localized into more than 70 languages.
But I’d love to see a way to make screencasts with narration work in a situation like this because they’re so much easier to follow. Here’s an example: Silent vs. Narration
So over lunch we kept kicking ideas around and David had a thought about breaking the video up and pairing it with text instructions that I think could make a system that will degrade gracefully (or looking at it from the other direction – offer progressive enhancements).
How it could work is that you see a short video with narration and text explaining the first part of the instructions. Then you click to move on to the following steps. Example: Video-Narration-Text
If there is no narration available for the video we’ve still made it easier to follow along (and to localize) by breaking it up into short pieces and by including text instructions right below or beside the video. Example: Video-Text
And if there isn’t video available at all, screenshots can be substituted. Example: Screenshots-Text
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Screencasts with audio, IMHO, are more effective.
For one of my clients who needed localization, I created a process for them that looked like this:
1. Start with a script. This allows the same concepts & steps to be re-written in a different language.
2. Chunk your script into sections like Intro, Objective 1, Objective 2, Objective 3, Conclusion. You will place title slides between these sections.
3. Record a separate audio track for the script. Scripts can be read straight through and split in your screencasting application.
4. Record short screencast segments for each chunk of your script. Use your application’s pause key and split in post if necessary.
5. Assemble title slides, screencast recordings, and audio track in your screencasting application. Don’t worry about absolute perfection on timing audio to screencast movement. The chunk is close enough.
This process is allowing us to quickly re-package English, Spanish, and Mandarin Chinese versions together.
This is also a good segway into the topic of embedded timed metadata.
http://wiki.xiph.org/Metadata
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[...] was reminded of this by what Mozilla faces with their screencasts. In a post, they talked about having to provide support in 70 languages. I commented on my process for my [...]