Create Accessible Captions
College policies require that recordings published on a college website or used in academic courses have captions that are compliant with the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). While Panopto will automatically generate captions, these captions are not always ADA-compliant! As a result, it's important for you to understand captioning policies and best practices.
Who is responsible for captioning?
The first step to creating successful captions is understanding who is responsible for creating them. This will change depending on what type of recording is being captioned. Familiarize yourself with these categories and make sure to reach out early for when you need help with captioning:
- Recordings used in an academic course by student(s) with documented disabilities: contact Deb Alder, Director of Access Services, or the Access Services department
- DVD's or streaming videos available through the Tri-Co library collections: put in a Help Ticket.
- All other recordings: captions must be handled by the individual or department publishing the recording.
Captioning best practices
When creating captions, it is important to note that they are created with the assumption that viewers cannot hear what's being said. This is different from subtitles, which are created with the assumptions viewers can hear what's being said but cannot understand it. For this reason, captions require all meaningful sounds to be conveyed.
According to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) guidelines, captions must be:
- Accurate: Captions must match the spoken words in the dialogue and convey background noises and other sounds to the fullest extent possible.
- Synchronous: Captions must coincide with their corresponding spoken words and sounds to the greatest extent possible and must be displayed on the screen at a speed that can be read by viewers.
- Complete: Captions must run from the beginning to the end of the program to the fullest extent possible.
- Properly placed: Captions should not block other important visual content on the screen, overlap one another or run off the edge of the video screen.
Tip: Please refer to this Captioning Tip Sheet to access specific rules for captioning correctly.
Third-party captioning
In addition to supporting uploaded captions, Panopto also supports the use of third-party captioning services. In fact, several services have integrations that enable users to request captions within Panopto. College departments typically use Rev.com, an approved vendor in eMarket whose turnaround time is usually within 24 hours.
If you would like LITS to set up a Rev.com integration for you or your department, please do the following:
- Follow Rev.com’s instructions for creating an account and generating an API User Key and API Access Token.
- Email this information to help@brynmawr.edu and ask us to set up a Panopto integration for this Rev.com account.
- A member of LITS will respond to ask how you would like to handle caption requests:
- LITS can give certain users account-level permission to request captions. Once this is enabled, they will be able to place requests for any recording by clicking on Settings > Captions and choosing your group's account from the Request captions menu.
- LITS can also set up a folder so that captions are automatically requested whenever anyone places a recording in it. You can also designate others as Creators in this folder so that they may request captions.
Further Resources on Captioning
- Viewing Video Captions (Panopto)
Questions?
If you have any additional questions or problems, don't hesitate to reach out to the Help Desk!
Phone: 610-526-7440 | Library and Help Desk hours
Email: help@brynmawr.edu | Service catalog
Location: Canaday Library 1st floor
