Video captioning is mandated primarily for deaf and hard-of-hearing viewers; however, it is a best practice to provide captioning for all of your web and course videos. Studies estimate that more than 70% of all students use captioning to help them learn.

Panopto offers Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) captions, which are machine-generated captions of your videos. Automatically generated captions are thought to be approximately 60-70% accurate. This means that, on average, 1 in 3 words will be incorrectly transcribed by ASR. That is not acceptable for a deaf or hard-of-hearing individual who relies on having accurate captions to learn, and can cause confusion for any student who views videos with captions.

If you choose to enable automatic machine captions in Panopto, you must also commit to editing them. Proper spelling and punctuation in Panopto captions is critically important to the quality of your Panopto recordings. The process for revising Panopto ASR captions is described below.

Enable automatic machine captions

You will first need to enable automatic machine captions at the folder level.

1. Sign in to Panopto.
2. Navigate to your Folder in Panopto and select the three dots on the far right of the screen to open More Actions.
3. Select the gear icon for Settings.
4. From the menu, select Settings.
5. Scroll down to Request Captions. Use the drop-down menu to select Automatic Machine Captions. (It can take up to 8 hours to process machine-generated captions for a 60-minute video.)
6. Select the "X" to close the window.
   

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Edit automatic machine captions

It is vital that you review and edit all machine-generated captions for accuracy.

1. Hover over the title of your video and select the Edit icon.
   
2. In the left menu, select Captions.
3. You will see the captions displayed in time-stamped sections alongside the video. Click on the caption text and begin typing to correct the text.
   
4. Play the video to listen and pause to type. As you type, ensure that the text is accurate and check that all spelling, grammar, and punctuation are correct.
5. Changes are automatically saved as they are made. When you are finished, select Apply at the top of the screen to save any caption or video edits and exit editing mode.

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Printing Transcripts

Students can now download captions as a transcript when they view a video in Panopto, without any additional work by the instructor. Transcripts can be downloaded for videos with captions by following these steps.

1. Open the video that you want to download transcripts for. 
2. Select the Captions tab.
   
3. In the upper right corner of the Captions area, select the Download icon. Captions automatically download as a .txt file. 
   

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Manually Add Audio Descriptions

In the editor, select the Audio Descriptions tab from the left-hand navigation. Select the point in the timeline where you want it to be read. Then, enter the audio description in the textbox that states Enter an audio description and hit enter. Be sure to select Apply in the upper-right corner of the editor to apply your changes.

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Edit or Delete Audio Descriptions

On the Audio Descriptions tab of the editor, hover over the entry you want to edit, select the three vertical dots that appear to its right, and on the drop-down menu that appears, select Edit. A pop-up window will appear where you can edit the audio description's text or the timestamp at which it appears. Select Save to save your changes. 

For more information about adding and editing Panopto audio descriptions, see How to Add Audio Descriptions from Panopto Support.

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