This episode of Podcast Answers explores making your podcast accessible to everyone. It emphasizes providing transcripts, using clear audio and a moderate speaking pace, and describing visual content for audio-only listeners. Other tips include content warnings, offering multiple audio formats for limited data, ensuring screen reader friendly platforms, and adding captions for video.

Welcome, everybody, to Podcast Answers, the show where I help you start and grow your

podcast, answering any podcasting questions along the way. That's right. Today we are

talking about accessibility. What's that mean for your podcast? What's that mean? How do

you create an accessible podcast for yourself.

But first, a few things to cover.

If you want to join us in our live Zoom backstage, you can go to podcastanswers.com/backstage.

That'll get you into our backstage and that will allow you to hang out with me, ask questions,

potentially even be on screen.

So if you want to do that again, that's podcast answers.com/backstage.

And we would love to have you.

But first, let's talk a little bit today about podcast accessibility.

So what are some ways to make your podcast more accessible?

First is providing transcripts for every episode.

So you can easily do that a couple different ways.

I use a software called Mac Whisper,

which allows me to generate

after I've created my podcast episode.

I take Mac Whisper, I run my audio through it,

and what it does is it creates a transcript file,

a SRT or VTT transcript file,

which you can then, on most new podcast apps,

you can, or most new podcast hosts,

you can attach that to that,

and it will allow you to create a transcript

in your RSS feed that allows the podcast apps to play that file as you're playing it, as

you're playing your episode so that that way people can read along with your episode.

Super handy for those, especially that may be hard of hearing or as we've seen today,

a lot of our new generation has the captions on when we are when they were talking, like

when we're watching TV, they have captions on.

So you can do this for that so that they can make it easier to hear easier to see easier

to be with that.

Now the other thing that you can do is is some podcast hosts will generate that that

SRT or VTT file for you, meaning that you upload your file and they will generate the

file put it in your feed.

Now this may be a cost for some some things I'm I host on captivate and if I allow captivate

to create my my transcript, then it does cost me a little bit for them to do that.

But it allows that they will generate that if you don't have

if you do not have that ability to generate that on your own.

Yes. So it is a pretty awesome software

because it does allow you.

MacWhisper is a pretty allow awesome software.

It does allow you to create that right locally on your machine.

And it allows you to give get all of the files that you need for

for your podcast host.

Now, the great thing is, if you don't even do this, some

some podcast players will generate one for you.

Apple Podcasts recently has started

creating transcripts for you if you do not provide one in your podcast feed.

So the great thing about that is that allows you to

you don't have to do anything.

You can just go upload your file.

And then once Apple podcast gets that, they will create a transcript for you

for those watching in in Apple or listening in Apple podcast.

So that that's one way that you can make your podcast more accessible.

The other thing is to use clear audio and speak at a moderate pace.

So using a good mic is going to help.

You don't have to get a mic like I have.

I have an SM7B that's a but a $400 mic, but that will that mic is going to create amazing

audio and allow you to to have amazing audio going forward.

Now you don't have to have an amazing mic to do that.

You can get one for $100 or even less, but that will make your audio sound really good.

Again, an audio that's not listenable.

People are going to turn off right away.

It's not going to be able to hear because a lot of sometimes people have hearing problems.

And if you have a good mic, that's going to help them get that audio in there in your

ear in their ear and be able to understand you, you better.

The next thing that I'm going to say is speak slow.

So speak at a moderate pace.

You're going to have to speak slower than you think you need to.

going to sound painful probably to yourself. I know for me when I'm not behind the mic

right here, I speak at an incredibly fast pace. And some may even say that even on the

mic that I do that, that I, I speak really fast and it's hard to understand me. I always

joked growing up that my sister and I spoke so fast to each other and we could understand

each other, but no one else could understand us because we spoke so fast.

But. In a podcast, you don't want to do that,

you want to speak slower than you think that you need to,

it's going to sound really slow to you because you hear yourself

when you when you're hearing yourself, you understand what you're saying

because you know the intent behind your topics,

you know the intent behind what your speech and so.

But the other people that are listening to you don't know what you're saying,

You you know that you know what you're saying so you can say it faster.

But those listening to you don't know what you're going to be saying.

And so it takes some time to hear you.

And when you speak fast, a lot of times we jumble up our words.

We smush them together, and it's really hard to understand.

Now, that gets even worse for somebody who's not a native speaker

of the language that you're speaking in.

I'm doing this podcast in English, but if I had a French speaker

that doesn't know English very well or a Spanish speaker that doesn't know English very well.

Now think about that.

They're trying to translate that in your head, their head.

They're trying to listen to you speak.

And it gets really hard to do that because if you're speaking so fast, they can't understand

what you're saying.

They're going to have trouble trying to translate what you're saying in their head.

So speak a lot slower than you think that you actually need to to get your job done.

Now, the next thing that I would say is when you are talking and you're describing something

because now, especially if we're doing video, if we're doing a video show, like I have this

on on YouTube as well as an audio podcast, I may say something like, hey, this is my

phone.

This is an awesome phone.

Well, I just held up my phone, but you don't know that if you're just listening in audio.

So I need to describe what I'm saying.

This is my phone.

It's an iPhone 16 on the back of it.

It has a clear case and on the back of it as a QR code.

And it is an amazing phone.

I love it.

Describe what you're saying.

Describe what you're seeing.

Describe, describe, describe it because your audio only listeners are not going to have

any idea what you're actually talking about.

The next thing I want to say to you, and this isn't necessarily for.

Making it accessible, exactly,

but depending on what your show is about, you may need to include content

warnings for sensitive topics.

Do this in a pre-roll.

I've recently done an episode, not on this show, but on a different one

where normally that show is going to be family friendly.

Normally we're talking to families.

I know people listen in the car with their kids.

And our guests used a couple of some language

that wasn't necessarily suitable for all audiences.

And so what I did is after the interview,

I went ahead and recorded a pre-roll that said, essentially, Hey, I know that you

people may normally listen to this in the car with their youngins.

And just wanted to let you know, this interview does contain some.

some language, or if I was talking about a sensitive topic

that I may not want my kids to hear, I want to include that in a pre-roll.

Now, another thing that you can do is.

Offer multiple audio formats, this is going to become accessible for people,

you have to think about this, your audio, if you're recording in an MP3

and you're, let's say, doing it at stereo 128 K.

That's not very, very big in today's standards, right?

I mean, it's it's about a mega minute or something.

But what happens to those people who are in third world countries

or in places that don't actually

they can't get the data that you can?

There's a lot of places that can't get data like we can here in the US

and in other parts of the world.

So you think about creating a lower quality format,

maybe something that's mono in

96 K or even less.

Bitrate, it's going to be a lot smaller file.

You can do this a couple of different ways.

You can use the alternative enclosure with a new podcasting to 2.0 standards,

which allows you to say, hey, this is my normal enclosure,

but this is a lower bitrate one or this is a video one

that's not necessarily used in a lot of the podcasting apps yet.

But the other thing you can do is create separate feeds for this.

So let's say you have

a video feed in an audio feed.

for people who just want to listen to your audio or even a low bitrate feed.

Create a separate podcast RSS feed.

Now, the other thing you want to do is ensure that your website

and podcast platform are screen reader friendly.

There's a couple of ways you can do this,

but you want to make sure that screen reader friendly

with all of your alt tags on your pictures and things like that.

That way, people that are using screen readers can understand

what they're seeing on on your website and things like that.

because again, I do recommend that you have a website.

Now, again, the last thing I would say is consider adding captions

if you have a video version.

Now, traditional actual video podcasts in the RSS.

You should probably bake in your captions for that.

And what that I mean is you when you're doing your video

editing, generate captions and they're on the video.

This way, people watching your video can have captions.

Now, again, that's not.

Super relevant in today's day and time,

because a lot of people who are doing video shows are not using

video files in their RSS, they're actually just using them on YouTube.

So if you're using YouTube, great, because YouTube will generate captions for you

if your video is hosted there.

So these are just a few things that you can do to make your podcast

a little bit more accessible to people.

I would do just encourage you to go out and make awesome content that's accessible for

everybody.

And if you have any questions, if you feel free to contact me at podcast answers dot

com slash contact.

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this show, I would encourage you to give that value back.

You can do that by going to podcastanswers.com/buymeacoffee and you can just show me your appreciation

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So with that, guys, have a great week and keep podcasting!