Subtitles or transcripts are absolutely essential for hearing-impaired people to understand videos. They are also helpful for students without a disability; for example, if someone wants to watch a video without sound or doesn’t understand the language very well.

“Closed” and “open” captions

“Closed” means that the captions are saved in a separate file along with their time markers and the player plays them back parallel to the video. This means that the captions are easy to read even with compressed file formats and that they can be switched on and off as desired. “Open” captions, on the other hand, are part of the video and cannot be switched off.

Captions vs. subtitles

In English, we distinguish between “captions” and “subtitles”. Captions describe the entire soundtrack, including sounds and spoken language. Subtitles simply show the dialog, perhaps in a different language than the spoken language. All the common video processing programs offer the ability to manually insert subtitles and/or captions. Some are also able to produce captions automatically. Here, we will briefly describe how to add subtitles in Panopto. We recommend using the most common subtitle format, .srt.

Adding subtitles with Panopto

The University of Basel recommends the Panopto software for working with videos and creating subtitles.

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• Import your video file to ADAM (in your workspace, “Add new object”) and then select “Panopto Video”.
• Once the object is imported, click “Edit”. The Panopto web interface will open.
• Select “Subtitles” in the Panopto interface.
• In the Language menu, set the subtitle language and type the text into the appropriate box. Hit the Enter key to save the subtitle.
• Keep optimal contrast in mind: Click on the three dots on the bottom right to set font colour, size, position, and background.
• When you have entered all the subtitles, you can adjust the times precisely by clicking on the three dots on the bottom right and selecting “Edit”.
• Save the new video with subtitles with the “Apply” button. Alternately, you can write your subtitles in advance and then import them into Panopto.
• To do this, write your subtitles in a text editor; for example, Notepad.

• For each subtitle, use the following format:

  1. Identifier (must be a number)
  2. Time in the format HH:MM:SS, milliseconds optional
  3. Text of the subtitle
  4. Empty line as a divider before the next subtitle

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The first two subtitles for a typical lecture video will look something like this:

1
00:00:00 - -> 00:00:05
Welcome to the lecture

2
00:00:05 - -> 00:00:22
I hope this class will fulfil your expectations.

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• Don’t forget to transcribe any “meaningful” sounds.
• Save the file with the extension .srt; for example, my-subtitles.srt. You must type the extension manually. The file type will remain “text file”.
• In the Panopto web interface, in the “Subtitles” menu, select the “import subtitles” function.

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Transcribing the audio track

Subtitling – especially inserting the precise time markings – can be very time-consuming for a long video. Check whether you can convert the entire video into a text document with images, especially if a video mostly contains static images. Transcribing the audio track as text is much less work than subtitling. The transcription could also serve as the basis for a text document for visually impaired students. A good software program for transcription of audio files is VoiceDocs https://voicedocs.com; it is however not free to use.

Recording your own lecture

For students with hearing impairments, it can be very helpful if you record your lectures. The students can listen to everything again at their own pace, replaying or slowing the recording as needed. Lectures presented online should ideally be pre-recorded (not presented live during a Zoom conference). This has the following advantages for hearing-impaired students:

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• Better sound quality
• No acoustic disturbances
• Subtitles can be created more easily.
• The text and content are more linear, i. e. they contain fewer spontaneous tangents and reactions, which could make them difficult to follow.

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