Typed Captions

What is it?

This plugin is one of the official bbb plugins. It implements the previous typed captions feature that was present in the core of BBB, but as a plugin and with some different UI and features within. So the idea is that you can simply type the captions in the sidekick panel that will appear and it will appear just like a normal automatic-captions on the bottom of the presentation area.

See demo below:

cd $HOME/src/plugin-typed-captions
npm ci
npm run build-bundle

The above command will generate the dist folder, containing the bundled JavaScript file named TypedCaptions.js. This file can be hosted on any HTTPS server along with its manifest.json.

If you install the Plugin separated to the manifest, remember to change the javascriptEntrypointUrl in the manifest.json to the correct endpoint.

To use the plugin in BigBlueButton, send this parameter along in create call:

pluginManifests=[{"url":"<your-domain>/path/to/manifest.json"}]

Or additionally, you can add this same configuration in the .properties file from bbb-web in /usr/share/bbb-web/WEB-INF/classes/bigbluebutton.properties

Extra settings:

Pay attention that the audio captions must be enabled, to do that, you open /etc/bigbluebutton/bbb-html5.yml and add the yaml directive public.app.audioCaptions.enabled=true, just like the following:

public:
  app:
    # You may have other setting items here
    audioCaptions:
      enabled: true

also, ensure the captions needed are uncommented in the list public.app.audioCaptions.language.available, as the following example for en-US:

public:
  app:
    audioCaptions:
      language:
        # the uncommented languages will be loaded as captions 
        available:
        # - de-DE
          - en-US
        # - fr-FR

Make sure you don't change any other setting, save the file, and we're good to go!

Development mode

As for development mode (running this plugin from source), please, refer back to https://github.com/bigbluebutton/bigbluebutton-html-plugin-sdk section Running the Plugin from Source