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 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 click theon the far-right side of the screen.
3. Click Settings.
4. On the Settings page, scroll down to Request Captions. Use the drop-down menu to select Automatic Machine Captions. (It can take up 8 hours to process machine-generated captions for a 60-minute video.)
   

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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 click the Edit icon. It looks a pencil.
   
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 is 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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Print

It is often helpful to provide a written transcript of your video for your students. Using the edited Panopto captions is a great way to create a transcript.

1. Sign in to Panopto. Navigate to your Folder, and hover over the title of your video.
2. Navigate to Settings and then Captions.
   
3. Select Download file. The captions will be downloaded to your computer as a .vtt file, which can be read by TextEdit (Mac) or NotePad (PC). You can also copy and paste this text into Word or Google Docs for formatting before sharing.
   

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