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:

Running the Plugin from Source

1. Start the development server:

cd $HOME/src/plugins/typed-captions
npm install
npm start

2. Add reference to it on BigBlueButton's settings.yml:

  plugins:
    - name: TypedCaptions
      url: http://127.0.0.1:4701/static/TypedCaptions.js
      dataChannels:
        - name: typed-captions-data-channel
          writePermission: ['moderator','presenter']
          deletePermission:
              - moderator
              - sender

Building the Plugin

To build the plugin for production use, follow these steps:

cd $HOME/src/plugins/typed-captions
npm install
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.

To use the plugin with BigBlueButton, add the plugin's URL to settings.yml (/etc/bigbluebutton/bbb-html5.yml is the file you are looking for) as shown below:

public:
  app:
    ... // All app configurations
  plugins:
    - name: TypedCaptions
      url: <<PLUGIN_URL>>
      dataChannels:
        - name: typed-captions-data-channel
          writePermission: ['moderator','presenter']
          deletePermission:
              - moderator
              - sender
  ... // All other configurations

Alternatively, you can host the bundled file on the BigBlueButton server by copying dist/TypedCaptions.js to the folder /var/www/bigbluebutton-default/assets/plugins. In this case, the <<PLUGIN_URL>> will be https://<your-host>/plugins/TypedCaptions.js.

More

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 itms here
    audioCaptions:
      enabled: true

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