Adobe Captivate (12.5 update) Release Notes

What's new and changed in this update

Release date: January 21, 2025

Adobe Captivate 12.5 introduces new features and enhancements designed to improve user productivity, enhance accessibility, and streamline the content creation process. This release also addresses key user pain points while providing expanded creative possibilities. Here are the highlights of the key features:

A new accordion widget for creating expandable, vertically stacked items and the option to add headers or footers for branding. The update supports Adobe Fonts, enabling easy font installation, and allows importing or exporting custom design options to maintain consistent branding. Web objects can now embed external content like HTML5 media, videos, and PDFs. Generate AI-powered text-to-speech for closed captions with various accents, languages, genders, and tones to match the course style. Users can rename text presets for clarity, while macOS Sequoia compatibility ensures broader platform support. Accessibility upgrades include project-level speech agent language settings, new fonts, and bug fixes.

Download the update

Visit the Captivate downloads page and try out the new update.

Topics in this page:

Accordion widget for interactive content

The new Accordion widget allows creators to organize content into collapsible sections. These accordions are perfect for progressive content disclosure, offering a cleaner and more interactive layout for learners. Each accordion includes customizable components such as titles, subtitles, body text, and navigation buttons. With support for up to 20 accordions per widget, you can effectively manage content-heavy projects. Additionally, you can personalize states (hover, visited, disabled) and background styles and even replace default icons with custom SVG files to align with their branding. Learn more about accordions in Adobe Captivate.

Header and footer branding blocks

Captivate 12.5 introduces customizable headers and footers that can be applied across slides. These elements are ideal for adding branding components such as logos, course titles, slide numbers, and navigation tools. Users can dynamically insert variables like learner names or dates to personalize the learning experience. The auto-layout feature ensures responsive design compatibility across devices, while styling options allow for further customization of backgrounds, borders, and spacing. Learn more on headers and footers in Adobe Captivate.

Integration with Adobe Fonts

Integrating Adobe Fonts into Captivate streamlines font management and ensures a consistent visual experience across projects. You can now add fonts directly from your Creative Cloud library. This update also ensures that shared projects retain their intended fonts. When a project is published, the fonts are packaged within the output files, preventing display inconsistencies. For users without access to Adobe Fonts, fallback options are provided to maintain design integrity. Learn more on how to add Adobe fonts to your project.

Import/export custom design options

Create tailored layouts using JSON files, define custom styles, and seamlessly share these options with your teams. Captivate allows for the export of custom themes as ZIP files, which can be easily imported and applied to other projects, ensuring collaboration and uniformity in design. Learn more on how to import or export custom design options in Captivate.

Add web objects to your project

Web Objects lets you embed external content such as HTML5 media, videos, and PDFs directly into Captivate slides. This allows for greater interactivity and integration of third-party resources. Web Objects can be added using URLs, embed codes, or uploaded PDFs, providing flexibility in content inclusion. The appearance of these objects can be customized with captions, subtitles, and interactive buttons. Learn more on web objects in Adobe Captivate.

Generate text-to-speech using AI voices

Adobe Captivate now allows authors to convert closed captions into realistic audio using AI-powered voices, offering a wide selection of accents, languages, genders, and tones to match the tone and style of their course. This feature delivers natural, high-quality narration, enhancing the learner experience by enabling authors to select multiple captions and assign different voice agents to each or all captions collectively. It also ensures consistency by providing the ability to update audio whenever changes are made to captions or voice agents, improving engagement and accessibility. Learn more on generating text to speech in Captivate.

Rename text presets

To support unique branding and compliance requirements, Captivate now allows users to rename text presets. For example, a generic "Heading 1" can be renamed to "Course Title" or "Section Header" to align with organizational standards. Renamed presets are grouped for easy access and can be exported with themes for consistent application across projects.

Accessibility enhancements

Accessibility enhancements in this release include the ability to set a global speech agent language for projects. This feature simplifies the workflow by allowing authors to define the language once while retaining the flexibility to override it for individual components. Global settings do not overwrite pre-configured elements, ensuring that previous customizations remain intact.

Other enhancements

This update introduces compatibility with macOS Sequoia (15.x), ensuring smooth performance for macOS users. New fonts, such as IBM Plex Sans and IBM Plex Mono, have been added to expand creative possibilities. Dropdown interaction components now offer hover state customization, enhancing their visual appeal and user experience.

Bug fixes in this update

Adobe Captivate (12.5 update) fixed the following bugs:

• Matching dropdown/combo box options are sometimes visually cut-off- when dropdown options have a lot of text. 
• The click-box component in simulation slide interactions was not properly set as a scorable object in the quiz settings, causing it to be excluded from the scoring calculation on the results slide.

System requirements

Check the System Requirements for Adobe Captivate 12.5.

Update to the latest version

After clicking Help > Check for Updates, the error message, Error 184, may display.

Follow the steps below to resolve the issue:

1. In version 12.0, 12.1, 12.2, 12.3, or 12.4 select Help > Check for Updates.
2. Once the update is visible, close the Adobe Captivate app.
3. Select Update now.