Making Media More Accessible - Transcripts for podcasts

Transcripts for podcasts have long been known to be great for SEO, but they are also vital for making your podcast accessible for members of your audience with hearing problems.

Photo by Aman Upadhyay on Unsplash

Scripted podcasts have the upper hand here - if you already have a script for your podcast, adding it to a page on your website, or into your show notes, provides a ready made transcript.

If your podcast is unscripted, writing transcripts can seem like a massive task, but there are options to save you having to type everything out yourself. Podscribe will automatically provide a transcript and player to embed on your website for each episode you release. The transcription isn’t perfect, but is easily editable and saves a lot of time. If you prefer a real human to write your transcript, Take Note is a very popular service.

However you choose to transcribe your podcast, the key is to make it available in as many places as possible. It should be both embedded and downloadable on the episode’s page on your website. You could also consider having a download link in your shownotes.