Accessibility Support - Panopto

 

Accessibility is a critical feature we look for in all of our supported learning technology applications. Fortunately, the purveyors have responded to this requirement by updating their products in order to support both disabled and able-bodied students alike. In fact, able-bodied students take advantage of accessibility features too - such as using closed captions in environments where speakers or earbuds cannot be used. In this blog, we look at the accessibility features in one of our most popular products - Panopto. To date, nearly 16,000 users have viewed Panopto recordings at ESU. Approximately 700 faculty, staff, and students have downloaded and installed the Desktop Recorder, which was used to create nearly 11,000 recordings.

PANOPTO ACCESSIBILITY

Panopto offers accessibility features that allows users to easily navigate and read the Panopto web interface. The web interface supports screen readers for all available creator and viewer interfaces. The web interface also support keyboard access, allowing you to use the tab key to access all available functions. All sessions fully support adding and displaying captions.

SCREEN READER SUPPORT

Panopto supports the following screen readers:

1. JAWS
2. NVDA
3. VoiceOver for Mac

KEYBOARD ACCESS
All of the functionalities and links in the web interface are accessible by using the tab key. The tab key will move from function to function, and you can hit enter to use that function. 

VIEWER CAPTIONS
The Panopto viewer will display captions for the session when available. The caption will show in two places. The first is under the Primary Video in the Captions tab. The caption that is currently being spoken will be highlighted in grey. The second is either overlaid on the secondary video or docked directly under the video. Panopto includes an artificial intelligence engine that can generate Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) captions. Keep in mind that the quality of the ASR can degrade significantly if the microphone is further than a few inches from the presenter, or if there are significant room distractions/noise.

SHORTCUT KEYS

The new viewer allows you to use shortcut keys to control the player:

• Spacebar - Pause/Play the session
• Left/Right arrow keys - skip 5 seconds backward or forwards
• Up/Down arrow keys - adjust volume up or down
• The M key - mutes and unmutes the recording
   

EMBEDDED PLAYER CAPTIONS

When captions are available for a session they will also be displayed on the embedded video player. When you embed a video with captions, the captions will overlay the video as shown below. You can see how to embed videos here.