Captivate Classic, out of the .cptx and onto a phone screen.

Adobe once set a 2027 end date for Captivate Classic, and then lifted it. Its blog post of 17 March 2025 says support will continue “until you’ve successfully transitioned.” Captivate Classic still works.

Captivate 13.1, released on 16 April 2026, added a beta Classic importer. It opens .cptx projects saved in 11.8.3 or later and produces non-responsive output. It cannot start from a published course. That leaves out older projects, lost source files, and anyone who wants a course that reflows on a phone. Compare it with Scormbusters in detail.

Captivate can only edit a .cptx; it cannot open its own published output, and Adobe’s Classic importer needs a .cptx too. When the project file is lost, the published course is the only copy you have, and it is enough.

A Captivate HTML5 publish is not a video of the course. It carries the whole project model as data: every slide, caption, image and audio clip, the accessibility text for each object, and each question’s type and correct answers. Scormbusters reads that data without running any of the course’s JavaScript and rebuilds it as an editable course.

1. Find the course package in your LMS or file share. Any Captivate HTML5 publish works, whether it was exported as SCORM 1.2, SCORM 2004, xAPI or a web folder; zip the folder if it is not already a zip.
2. Import it and read the import report.
3. Edit the course: fix wording, replace images, add alt text, rebuild anything the report lists.
4. Export SCORM 1.2, SCORM 2004, cmi5 or xAPI and upload it to your LMS in place of the old package.

• The words learners saw. Captions and text are read from the project data and the accessibility text Captivate stores, not guessed from images.
• Images, audio and video, including slide narration and closed captions where present.
• Quizzes with their answer keys: multiple choice and multiple answer, fill-in-the-blank, matching and sequence questions, and the quiz pass mark.
• Structure. Each slide becomes a lesson of ordinary content in reading order. It is not a pixel-for-pixel copy, which is why the result reflows and works with a screen reader.
• Interactivity.When a course's actions keep state — variables, conditional (advanced or shared) actions, object states — it lands on the slide canvas with each object where it was, and its button, click-box and slide-enter actions are rebuilt as working triggers where the canvas runs them the same way: jumps, show and hide, assign, increment and decrement, if/else with AND or OR, and state changes. In our test corpus that was 40% of Classic publish actions. An all-new 12/13 publish does the same when every slide is free-positioned, as a PowerPoint deck imported into Captivate is; one built from responsive cards and widgets reflows, and its actions are listed in the report.
• A report of everything that could not be carried across, slide by slide.

Execute JavaScript, effects, timeline pause and continue, a jump to the last visited slide, text-entry logic and conditions on Captivate's own variables do not survive import; the report counts each one, by reason. Software simulations keep their jumps and reveals, not their scoring or timing. Scormbusters has its own branching, question types and a keyboard-accessible drag-and-drop, so rebuilding these usually means configuring blocks rather than scripting.

1. Run the free scan on a published course to see its accessibility problems and what a screen reader announces.
2. See your course rebuilt — free, no card: upload the published zip and play the rebuilt course before you sign up.
3. Import the course — the published zip or the .cptx — into Scormbusters.
4. Review the import report, fix what it flags, and rebuild any interactions. The editor checks contrast, alt text and structure as you work.
5. Export SCORM 1.2, SCORM 2004, cmi5 or xAPI and upload it to your LMS in place of the old one.

You own the result. Every course exports to SCORM, cmi5 and xAPI with no Scormbusters branding, plus a portable source file, so you are not trading one locked format for another.