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Able to "add caption language" for unsupported languages
Torben Frederiksen
Tyro
Currently captions can only be added to limited languages. I guess its the supported captions sound rips languages?. Would like to be able to translate captions to more/other languages that i have translated myself. Like arab, Bulgarian, persian ao. Could it be possible to add an "add captions language" button that does nothing else, but show a chosen language name for a language caption file i have added? would greatly improve the captions functionality with minimal coding for you?
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Comments
Yes, this is an important feature and should be easy to fix for Panopto. We have indigenous languages we are obligated to translate captions for. For a missing language in Panopto we have to upload and register it on a different language. This causes so much frustration.
Just wanted to add my voice here – this is a crucial feature for us and many others in Europe.
Here in the European Union, there are strong accessibility requirements we all need to meet. This means providing captions in our own local languages is quickly becoming a must-have, not just a nice-to-have.
The strange thing is, the hard part is already solved. Thanks to AI tools like our national Hugo.lv platform or services like ElevenLabs, we can easily generate highly accurate SRT caption files for smaller EU languages like Latvian, Lithuanian, and Estonian.
The real roadblock for us is that we can't tell Panopto that the SRT file we're uploading is actually in Latvian! This puts us in a tough spot. If a video only needs Latvian captions, we can just upload them as "English" and get by - a sort of a temporary workarround. But if we need captions in both Latvian and English, there's no way for our viewers to tell which is which. It makes the user experience confusing and defeats the whole purpose of accessibility.
The suggestion in the original post seems like the perfect fix: just let us add a custom language name for the captions we upload. It feels like a small change on your end that would make a massive difference for us.
This would be a huge win for all of your European customers and would help us meet our accessibility goals. This will allow us to improve compilance with EU's Web Accessibility Directive (2016/2102) and the European Accessibility Act. Really hope to see this move up the priority list soon!
Hey Bruno!
Thanks for adding your two cents here. The detailed explanation really helps us understand the use case and why this is critical for your company.
Our development team is actively considering this request, as it's been highly requested. We don't know when/if this will be implemented, but I encourage you to keep an eye on our release notes!
In the meantime, if anyone else comes along and agrees with this post, please upvote the original comment, or drop a comment of your own to share how this would improve your Panopto experience!