Creating Captions and Transcripts Using Panopto

Goal

To provide accessible content (captioned video & transcript) for online courses.

Task

Generate, and review/correct, captions using Panopto’s auto-caption (ASR) feature. Create a text transcript from those captions. 

Panopto’s auto-caption feature WILL MAKE MISTAKES; it generates captions with about 80% accuracy. In order to comply with ADA requirements, these captions need to be reviewed and corrected in order to achieve as close to 100% accuracy as possible. Please see DLINQ’s Caption Style Guide for guidelines as to what to include and omit, length of captions, etc.

Creating And Editing Captions in Panopto

  1. Follow these instructions to auto-generate captions for your video in Panopto
  2. Follow these instructions to edit those captions to ensure accuracy. Once those steps are completed, you are ready to create a transcript.

Creating a Transcript From Panopto Captions

Pantopo does not have a built-in tool to create a transcript, but we can use the (edited and corrected) caption file to generate text for a transcript.

Once you have generated captions and corrected them, to create a transcript:

  • download the caption file (.srt file) from Panopto (click on the video’s settings > captions > click the toggle under Available Captions > download file
  • Go to the Subtitle Tools website and upload the caption file you just downloaded to your computer. De-select the “Empty line between cues” box, and click Extract Text
  • You can either View Text and copy/paste into a Google doc/Word doc etc, or download the .txt file 
    • We recommend saving a copy of the transcript using one of these methods, rather than just copy/pasting the text directly into Canvas
  • Format the transcript text into short, topical paragraphs 
  • Add transcripts into Canvas