Featured Article

Improving Your Podcast’s Accessibility

by Carolyn Kiel

Most podcasters realize the importance of growing their audience. What they may not realize, however, is that they’re excluding millions of potential fans from their audience! That’s because most podcasts are not accessible. 

Accessibility is the practice of making information, activities, and spaces that can be understood and used by as many people as possible – specifically, people with disabilities. As an audio-focused medium, podcasts frequently exclude people with hearing disabilities (more than eleven million people in the United States, according to the U.S. Census Bureau), neurodivergent people, and people with information processing disabilities – many of whom would enjoy these podcasts if they were accessible.As an inclusive practice, making podcasts available for all is the right thing to do.

Accessibility also has other benefits. Podcast-accessibility.com points out that accessible podcasts can benefit people who are non-native speakers of the podcasts’ language, located in noisy environments, using low bandwidth internet connections, and in other situations that make audio content difficult to consume. As a podcaster, accessibility helps you, too. For example, not only do episode transcripts make your podcast more open, but they also help search engines discover your episodes and make it easier for you to repurpose your content.

Ready to make your podcast more accessible? Here are some actions you can take.

Audio
Prioritize clear audio quality.

• Record your episodes with a good quality microphone in a quiet room.

• Use a wired network connection and/or a recording platform that records audio locally on your computer, to minimize internet lags and maximize audio quality. 

• Mix your audio at a consistent volume level throughout the episode. Avoid recording sounds that are very loud or very quiet, or use compression to even out the volume of the recording. If you use background music, ensure the dialog can be understood clearly over the music.

Chances are, you’re doing a lot of this already. If so, that’s great. Your audio doesn’t have to be perfect, but these practices will make it more accessible.

Transcripts
Episode transcripts also help with accessibility. Despite this, podcast transcripts are rare. PodcastIndex.org reports that only about one percent of the English-speaking podcasts active in 2021 had any transcripts available at all. This makes transcripts a great opportunity to share your episodes with audiences who are ignored by most podcasts.

Transcripts typically include:

• Spoken words

• Speaker labels (i.e., who is saying what

• Important contextual information such as laughter, applause, vocal tone indicators, and sound effects

A transcript should be descriptive enough so that if someone reads it without listening to your audio recording, they will fully understand what’s going on in the episode.

There are a few different ways you can make a transcript. If you have a scripted show, then use your scripts to create transcripts. If you have an unscripted show, you can use automated transcription software like Descript or Otter.ai – but be prepared to review the transcript, correct transcription errors, and add contextual information to the final transcript. You can also choose to hire someone to transcribe your episodes by hand.

Creating an accurate transcript takes time, so build time for it into your production process. In the article “Let’s Make Podcasts More Accessible,” podcaster Caroline Mincks estimates it can take two to three times the length of the episode to correct an autogenerated transcript. As an example, for a twenty minute episode, plan between forty to sixty minutes to finalize the transcript.

The DiscoverPods.com article “How to Make Your Podcast More Accessible Using Transcripts” by Cassie Josephs recommends posting your transcripts on your podcast’s website. If you don’t have a website, then you can create a blog using Wordpress or another website and post your transcripts there. For each episode, the transcript should be posted in, or linked to, the same location as the audio. This makes it easier for people and search engines to find your transcripts.

Don’t put your transcripts behind a paywall. If your audio episodes are free, then your transcripts should be free too, so that everyone has equal access to your podcast.

Social media
As a podcaster, you’re probably marketing your podcast on social media. Here’s how you can make your social media posts more accessible.

• Add alt text to images. Alt text is a short description of an image’s basic details. People who are blind or have low vision may use screen readers that rely on alt text to describe images. Alt text should be one hundred twenty-five characters or less to ensure compatibility with screen readers. It should include any text that’s in the image and information required to understand the image.

• Most social media platforms have a designated place to add alt text on a post. A few platforms add alt text to images automatically, but this autogenerated alt text tends to be inaccurate. It’s better to add your own alt text.

• Alt text is different from an image description, which is longer and includes more details about the image. Image descriptions are helpful if you want to add more descriptive information and context for your image beyond what’s in the alt text. You can add image descriptions to the text of your posts.

• Use images with color combinations that are easier for people to view if they are colorblind or have low vision. Tools like the Color Contrast Checker at WebAIM.org and Color Blindness Simulator at Color-Blindness.com can help you check your color combinations and contrast. Include captions on any videos you create for your podcast.

• Some platforms like TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube offer automatic captioning. This can be helpful, but like with automated transcripts, you should check the captions for accuracy before publishing them.

• Make your caption styles as simple as possible. According to accessibility marketing consultant Meryl Evans at meryl.net, try to avoid captions that are written in fancy Unicode fonts, change sizes or colors, or show/highlight words one at a time. These effects can make captions distracting or difficult to read.

• If your video doesn’t have spoken or written words, the website accessible-social.com suggests adding a video description to your post that briefly summarizes important visuals and actions in the video.

• Avoid flashing lights or strobe effects in your videos, as these can trigger migraines or seizures. Use “camel case” formatting for hashtags and web addresses in your posts. Camel case capitalizes the first letter of each word; for example, #ILovePodcasts is camel case, but #ilovepodcasts and #ILOVEPODCASTS are not. Camel case is easier for many people to understand, especially if they are using screen readers. 

• Use emojis sparingly. 

• Screen readers recite the official Unicode names of emojis that appear in a post. As a result, a post with a lot of emojis can be distracting and difficult to understand for some readers. For example, the popular “red flag” meme that lists multiple red flag emojis in a row will cause many screen readers to say “triangular flag on post” (the Unicode name of the red flag emoji) each time that emoji appears.

• Don’t use emojis to replace words.

• Avoid using emojis in the middle of a sentence.

These are some of the ways to make your content more accessible to people with disabilities, boost your audience reach, and increase the number of people who discover your podcast. 

Accessibility may seem overwhelming at first, but these practices become routine when you build them into your podcasting workflow.

Making your podcast more accessible will open it up to new audiences of customers, patrons, followers, fans, and others who will enjoy and benefit from your content.

Carolyn Kiel is the host of Beyond 6 Seconds, a multi-award-winning neurodiversity podcast. She interviews neurodivergent people from around the world about their lives, identities and passions, with a focus on the intersections between neurodivergence and race, gender, sexual orientation, disability, and more. @beyond6seconds