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Is it possible to have captions downloadable as paragraphs?

Laurel MauryLaurel Maury Tyro
in General Q&A

Is it possible to have video captions downloaded as paragraphs? The current downloads aren't really usable because they're formatted as short 5-8 word couplets with a great deal of white space between them. They're basically unreadable.

This would ameliorate situations where the Panopto captions are insufficient. Panopto captions only show 5-8 words at a time, which isn't sufficient to present complex topics, like STEM. Because these shorts captions cannot stay on the screen for long, they penalize students who are slow readers.

Enabling students to download readable transcripts could mitigate both problems. Students could have the captions to read alongside of, or apart from, the videos.

Best Answer

  • Caitlin McCabeCaitlin McCabe Administrator
    Answer ✓

    Hi @Laurel Maury,

    Thank you for this feedback. I will be sharing this post with our Product Management team directly.

    In the meantime, are you able to share which university you are using Panopto with (either on this post or via a private message)? This way, we can connect directly with your university's Panopto administrator to address this concern.

    Best wishes,
    Cait

Answers

  • Caitlin McCabeCaitlin McCabe Administrator

    Hi @Laurel Maury,

    Captions can be downloaded as lines in a text document, as you've indicated, but not in paragraph form. If your organization has the setting, "Captioning - Enable Download in Viewers," set to True, Viewers should be able to download a text file of the captions without timestamps or excessive spacing by following the steps in How to Download Captions from the Viewer. If there is an issue with this, I would recommend reaching out to your local Panopto Administrator for assistance.

    Additionally, I did provide some workarounds as a response to your other post, "It is possible to increase the caption length?" including one where students can click on the Captions tab while viewing a video to see the full set of captions while they watch:

    image.png

    If you have any additional questions, please feel free to ask - we're always happy to help!

    Best wishes,

    Cait

  • Laurel MauryLaurel Maury Tyro

    Caitlin,

    I'm aware of this, but my concern is that the product isn't readable as text—not for complex subject like engineering. I'm an engineering student. I'm also hard-of-hearing. My university uses Panopto for captioning, and it's just not doing the job for STEM.

    The caption length is a concern for a similar reason; it's hard to learn complex subjects when you only see 5-8 words at a time.

    Is there a way to convince Panopto to make it's products usable for disabled students in STEM and other complex fields? This product makes it so that there's a struggle to understand the text before we even get to the material.

    Laurel

  • Laurel MauryLaurel Maury Tyro

    I'm at Johns Hopkins. They won't like that I've been communicating with you. I've found them very controlling toward their disabled students. I tried taking this issue to them, and they basically told me to get lost. Hopkins' disability services' solution is for me to download each one individually and use a 3rd-party tool to make the downloaded Panopto captions readable.

    My position is that's not realistic for ~160 lecture videos. I shouldn't have to perform extra work to make content readable.

    It's a real problem. For instance, I'm in a course right now with a module about modelling stock market trends. This involves lectures describing mathematical concepts for smoothing curves, looking at changes in velocity…. It's difficult to understand in 5-8 word chunks, or in lectures formatted like poems. This means Panopto's design choices are making the lives of disabled students that much harder.

    Panopto provides ADA/508 compliance, but in a manner that penalizes disabled students who depend on captions.

  • Laurel MauryLaurel Maury Tyro

    The previous, non-Panopto system formatted the material as a single block. While not optimal, I found it more readable than what Panopto does.

    Disability services says this is a preference. My position is that, for 6k per course, I should have readable material. Readable material doesn't come in 5-to-8 word chunks divided by time, or by whitespace.

  • Caitlin McCabeCaitlin McCabe Administrator

    Hi @Laurel Maury,

    Thank you for the additional context. I shared this information with the Product Management team this morning and we are looking into a few ways our captioning and captioning file downloads can be improved for accessibility.

    As a follow-up, and if you're comfortable doing this, can you DM me with a link to one of the STEM lectures so that we can investigate further?

    Thanks,
    Cait

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