Skillsoft boasts content in over a dozen languages, but until recently, offering translations of the closed captions in video courses was too expensive and technically difficult. To meet the demand, we harnessed Amazon Web Services’ new AI translation services.
Competitive research and requests from current customers drove our understanding of this project. The marketplace offers plenty of outstanding design patterns for video player controls. Our goal was to make something familiar, with minimal disturbance of our existing player controls.
The most interesting part of this design was getting the responsive presentation right. Several behaviors we’d previously set up in our player had to be tweaked so that my action menus would align reliably.
Our Accessibility team had a lot of input about this feature, and we needed a few iterations of the design and code to answer all concerns. Properly indicating focus, contrast, and how screen readers would read the menu items were among the issues considered and adjusted for.
Machine translation has seen a lot of improvements in recent years, but the AIs aren’t quite ready to be left on autopilot yet. Whenever the learner switches to a new closed caption language for their course, we ask after they’ve watched for a minute if they’d like to comment on the quality. We can take this feedback to our developers and to the service provider for continuous improvement.