What are captions and transcripts?
Captions and transcripts make audio and video content accessible to everyone. Captions display spoken words and important sounds as on-screen text, helping people who are deaf or hard of hearing, and anyone watching without sound. Transcripts provide a written version of all spoken dialogue and sound effects from a video or audio file, allowing users to read, search, or reference the content in text form.
How does captioning and transcripts work within Panopto?
All videos uploaded to Panopto will automatically receive machine-generated captions. While these captions are generally accurate, they may occasionally miss punctuation, misinterpret names, or incorrectly capture specific terminology. To ensure accessibility and clarity for your students, it’s best to review and edit your captions for accuracy before publishing your videos.
How does captioning and transcripts work within Zoom?
In Zoom, captioning and transcripts help make meetings and recordings accessible by converting spoken words into text in real time or after the session.
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Live captions: Zoom can automatically generate captions during a meeting using its built-in AI captioning feature. Hosts need to enable this in the meeting settings, and participants can turn captions on or off as needed. Please see Enabling or disabling automated captions in Zoom for more information.
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Transcripts: After a meeting is recorded to the cloud, Zoom can automatically create a text transcript of the audio. This transcript appears alongside the recording and can be searched, edited, or downloaded. Please see Using audio transcriptions for cloud recordings in Zoom for more information
What about third-party videos?
Videos from YouTube and other websites need to have proper captioning to ensure accessibility. Most video platforms have automated captioning added to videos, but this doesn't guarantee accessibility. Automatic captioning is usually not sufficient for accessibility because it often contains errors in spelling, grammar, punctuation, and speaker identification, which can make the content confusing or misleading for viewers. It may also misinterpret technical terms, proper names, or multiple speakers, and it doesn’t always convey important nonverbal information, like sound effects or tone. For captions to be fully accessible, they need to be reviewed and edited to ensure accuracy, clarity, and completeness.
If you are a faculty member who has a student with a documented need from Student Disability Services for captioning, please contact oeet@butler.edu and we will assist you in ensuring all your course videos are properly captioned.
