Captioning and Accessibility in Panopto

It is important to provide captions for any course video for the purposes of both accessibility and usability. Today, it’s easiest to accomplish this by using a combination of (edited) machine-generated and human-generated transcription services. 

The value added to any video by captions cannot be overstated - since they open up these videos to searching, and allow viewers to easily jump to specific areas of interest.

To learn more about accessible teaching practices, refer to ITC/DCAL’s guide on Creating Accessible Materials and Student Accessibility Services’ website.

Tips

• Collaborate with Student Accessibility Services on any captions for student accommodations. If a video is being transcribed specifically for a student with a documented accommodation, collaborate with Student Accessibility Services and their Assistive Technology team to ensure that the protocol meets the needs of the specific student and their profile.

• Meetings recorded in Zoom will have an automatic machine-generated transcription that comes over from Zoom shortly after the recording is processed. You may edit this speaker-identified transcript in Panopto to enhance the accuracy and quality of the captions.

• Machine-generated (called ASR by Panopto) transcripts without editing are not accurate enough for web accessibility requirements. Individual content creators must develop a workflow to ensure content quality and accuracy for these transcripts.

Links to Panopto’s documentation:

• How to Add ASR (Automatic Speech Recognition) Captions into a Video - This guide describes how to import and edit the ASR captions generated for videos within the captions editor. 

• How To Get High Quality ASR Caption Results In Six Steps - This guide describes tips for how to get high quality ASR captions when you set up your recording process and environment. 

• How to Upload a Caption File for a Video - Panopto supports the ability to upload standard captioning file formats for videos created on other video editors and platforms. This guide describes how to upload those caption files to import them successfully into Panopto. 

• How to Download Captions - It’s a good practice to keep a backup of your captions in a more localized format. This guide describes how to go about downloading your edited captions.

• Learn About Accessibility Features in Panopto’s platform - There are several features in Panopto’s platform intended to meet the needs of users who use screen readers, captions, or multiple means for navigating the user interface.

• Accessibility features found when Navigating the Video Viewer - This guide jumps to the specific accessibility features found in the video playback interface documentation overall.

• Learning About Best Practices for Captioning - This guide describes some of the pre-work to generate good captions within videos and organizational settings. 

• Panopto Maintains a WCAG Accessibility Conformance Report (updated February 2020) [links to external PDF] - This resource describes how Panopto conforms to the WCAG 2.0 guidelines from WebAim.

• How to Add Translated Captions - In addition to English-language captions, Panopto also supports captions for the purposes of translation. This guide describes how to add captions for those translation cases. 

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