Panopto Accessibility
Accessibility features in Panopto
Panopto’s accessibility features help students to easily navigate and read the Panopto web interface.We have listed some accessibility features of Panopto to improve your understanding.
Captioning
Captioning can actually improve the effectiveness of video in addition to making video content more accessible to viewers with impaired hearing.
Captions improve comprehension by native and foreign-language speakers. An Ofcom study showed 80% of people who use video captions don’t even have a hearing disability.
Captions help compensate for poor audio quality or background noise within a video.Captions make video useful when a person is watching with the sound off or viewing in a noisy environment that obscures the sound.
Captions provide viewers with one way to search inside of videos.
There are a few differences between open captioning and closed captioning in videos. Most notably, open captions are always on and in view, whereas closed captions can be turned off by the viewer. Open captions are part of the video itself, and closed captions are delivered by the video player or television (via a decoder). And unlike closed captions, open captions may lose quality when a video is encoded and compressed.
Captions show the words spoken in a video in the same language, while subtitles show the translation of words spoken in a different language. The words are shown on the screen in a foreign film in another language, for example, are considered subtitles.
How does captioning work in Panopto?
You can caption videos in Panopto a couple of different ways.
Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR)
Every video uploaded into Panopto (whether it was created with Panopto or not) is machine-transcribed using ASR technology. This provides the backbone for our video search technology, which means you can search inside the spoken content of every video you upload into Panopto.
Human-generated captioning
Panopto also gives you a few options for human-generated captioning, which meet Section 508 compliance guidelines for accuracy.
Option 1: Request 508-compliant video captioning right inside Panopto
For individual videos, you can request human-generated captions from within our online video editor. After your Panopto administrator sets up the captioning integration with us or one of our captioning partners, captioning can be requested with just a few clicks. Simply choose the captioning turn-around time and, when the human- generated captions are ready, they will automatically appear inside your video.
Human-generated captions can also be requested for all videos within a particular Panopto folder. Once configured, any new videos added to a folder will be automatically captioned. Similar to captioning requests for individual videos, your administrator can select and set a specific turnaround time for captioning the videos added to that folder.
Option 2: Manually upload human-generated captions to your video in the editor
You may have a different third-party captioning partner that you prefer, or one with which you already have a contract. Or you may even have people on staff to manually edit machine-generated captions for accuracy. In either case, you can easily upload the human-generated caption file through our online video editor. Panopto supports the SRT, ASHX, and DXFP captioning formats.
Note : Machine-generated captions can be generated in a quarter of the time it takes to play an individual video. If your organization chooses to process videos in batches overnight to conserve network bandwidth during peak hours, your captions may not be ready until the following day.
Human-generated captions are typically generated within two to five days, depending on the requested turnaround time and service options. Some human-generated captioning services can expedite 508-compliant captioning, turning it around in just 24 hours.
Panopto and Screen Readers
Panopto works with screen reader tools that are designed to read text displayed on-screen aloud for users with blindness or visual impairment. Panopto supports JAWS, NVDA, and VoiceOver for Mac screen reader software.
For more details check Panopto’s detailed accessibility guide discussing its core accessibility features.
Last Updated July/2021