0:00

You might hear from somebody and you know, they might say, Hey,

0:02

your website sucks. I can't find my way around your website,

0:05

or whatever they tell you. Just engage with them.

0:08

There's always ways to make it better.

0:11

You're listening to Podcast Insider, hosted by Mike Dell.

0:14

Todd Cochrane and Mackenzie Bennett from the Blueberry Team bring you weekly

0:19

insights, advice, and insider tips and tricks to help you start,

0:23

grow and thrive through podcasting. All with the support of your team here at Blueberry Podcasting. Welcome.

0:29

Let's dive in. I'm Mackenzie Bennett, marketing specialist at Blueberry. And.

0:34

I'm Mike Deve, VP of Customer Relations here at Blueberry.

0:38

And today we're going to explore the ways that you can make your podcast more

0:41

accessible. This is something that Blueberry has been kind of focused on

0:51

always in the back of our minds, of how podcasts can be more accessible to any type of audience

0:57

that a podcaster might have.

1:00

And there's a lot of different aspects that go into it from the content that you

1:04

are creating yourself to how we can help in the distribution end.

1:08

First things first, we wanna make sure that people understand accessibility in general.

1:13

Right? And, and part of the aspects of accessibility is also from

1:18

the creation side. We have lots of blind podcasters that use our services and whenever they

1:25

bring up something that they find it's not accessible,

1:29

that stop, drop and roll, that becomes priority one here because we want to make sure

1:36

that anybody that wants to use our stuff as best we can,

1:41

can use our stuff. And it goes the same way as creating your own podcast.

1:46

You want as many people to be able to consume the content as possible.

1:52

Yeah. First things first, people are always just focused on the audio content.

1:56

Considering for, for what it is, podcasting is mainly audio. However,

2:01

it, it does go more, it expands into that. There is video,

2:05

there is captions and transcripts.

2:08

There's just a wide variety of ways that it can expand just

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for anyone to be able to get the content in some type of way.

2:18

So some of those ways are hearing impairments, visual impairments,

2:23

specifically if you're doing like a video podcast, and just overall some cognitive impairments that people have,

2:29

whether it's greeting and writing and just understanding in general.

2:34

So creating that accessible content. First things first,

2:37

we want people to use clear and concise language within their shows.

2:42

Yes. And using jargon, we have the habit, uh,

2:47

especially us geeks. Uh, <laugh> have the problem of,

2:51

of using a lot of, a lot of short,

2:55

what do you call that? Uh, geez, I'm drawing a blank turn on the recording here.

3:00

And I, I lose my brain. <laugh>. Avoiding acronyms or aggregation.

3:06

Acronym. That's the word I was trying to find. <laugh>. Yeah. Those types of things. I mean, it,

3:11

it does make sense depending on the niche of your podcast,

3:15

includes some of those things because the people,

3:18

if they're most likely listening, are also privy to those words.

3:23

Yeah. And they're trying, they're trying to learn too.

3:25

So if you exactly use the acronym acronym, you can, uh,

3:30

define it in your show as well that that helps people learn those acronyms if

3:34

they're used in your subject matter.

3:37

Yeah. It's really just use it in a way that's understanding and open as opposed to

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very, uh, I don't know, kind of like condescending.

3:45

So definitely something else that we want people to think about is having clear

3:50

and consistent audio quality that just makes things so much easier on

3:55

the listener end. Yeah. There's nothing worse than listening to a playlist of podcasts.

4:00

They're listening to your back catalog and one episode is really low and they

4:05

gotta crank their volume up and then the next one comes on and it blows their

4:08

ears out. Yeah. And also the fact that a lot of the time podcasts are listened to

4:15

while people are moving. So any type of transportation,

4:19

like I know I have to crank all of my podcasts up when I'm in the car.

4:22

Just in general, being on the highway, same with, you know,

4:25

if someone's on the subway, it's loud, it's, you know, things are moving.

4:30

So that really helps as well.

4:32

Yeah, for sure. One of the things for the hearing impaired that you might want to consider is

4:38

transcripts. We are big fans of those here.

4:41

Yeah. We have a service here that can do transcripts and,

4:47

but you can also do them yourself or hire some other place,

4:52

but make it so that the transcripts are easily found.

4:56

Like our player has transcripts available and if you have

5:01

that it, somebody that's totally deaf,

5:03

they're just gonna wanna read the transcript.

5:07

But say you have low hearing or maybe English isn't your

5:12

first language, it's good to have the captions on while it's playing so

5:18

that you, if you didn't quite hear it right or something like that,

5:22

that's there. So we have that service through our partner Rev.

5:28

And then you can add it to a video podcast content as well.

5:32

Chrome browser. If someone's watching a video on the Chrome browser or listening to audio for

5:37

that matter, it'll auto caption if you said it right.

5:40

Yeah, I know YouTube does that. Almost the majority of social media places will do it too.

5:46

Yeah, I sometimes turn it on if the audio quality's a little bit goofy or I don't

5:50

wanna make a lot of noise, I'll turn the volume way down and <laugh> read the captions. Sometimes it's,

5:55

it's worth doing, even if you're not, uh, hearing impaired.

5:59

It's, it's just very, very popular nowadays.

6:02

You see it all over on any social media post.

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And then we're, we're really happy to be able to provide our rev partner,

6:11

our transcript partner and, and include the transcripts as part of our audio player as well for any

6:17

blueberry hosting customer. But it's also really,

6:20

really helpful for video podcasts. Like if people are doing that,

6:26

you kind of just expect it to be added at this point.

6:33

For the visually impaired. You wanna have descriptive audio and alternate texts on any

6:40

posts with the, with pictures or whatever. Mm-Hmm.

6:44

<Affirmative> in our postings, any type of images that we have on our website,

6:48

we do the alt text for. So I mean, I will,

6:51

I will admit I'm not necessarily the best at creating a long alt text,

6:56

but I do include one for every image that I add. It's just like a simple,

7:02

here's what you're looking at if you are not actually looking at it <laugh>.

7:06

And that's also helpful with SEO and I think the descriptive audio,

7:10

which is just a verbal description of like what is happening,

7:16

whether it's live or being spoken about. So.

7:19

Yeah. And that's just generally a nice thing to do if you're doing a,

7:22

a video and an audio version of your podcast.

7:27

Don't forget the audio people that will, it happens.

7:30

A lot with live recordings, like live shows at a venue or something like that.

7:34

And it's like people are discussing something,

7:36

but people just listening have no idea what they're looking at. Yeah.

7:40

Hey, look at this picture. You don't wanna do that in an audio podcast.

7:44

Yeah. Describe what you're looking at and that that helps both for visually

7:50

impaired people and people just listen to the audio of it.

7:53

So definitely wanna do that. Of course. Again,

7:56

we talked about the blueberry player having the accessibility built in as well

8:01

as a lot of the social media apps. They should,

8:05

should be aware of accessibility and a player design, say a, uh,

8:10

a visually impaired person. If they can't find the play button,

8:14

then your player sucks 'cause they're using screen readers.

8:17

So make sure that it's accessible that way.

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And also make sure you've got some sort of transcript available or cla

8:25

captioning or whatever for those hearing impaired.

8:30

Do you know of any podcast apps that include

8:35

transcriptions or if any of the podcasting 2.0 more

8:39

up-to-date apps are doing something for this?

8:43

Yeah, a lot of the podcast 2.0 apps, pod verse and Fountain and,

8:48

and quite a few others do use the transcript right there in the app.

8:54

So you can kind of follow it along. Like on Spotify you can click on lyrics and it'll,

8:59

it'll show you the lyrics of the song you're listening to. Well,

9:02

this does exactly the same thing in a podcast app,

9:06

but I don't think any of the mainstream ones are doing it yet. Maybe Spotify,

9:10

I don't know for sure though, and I don't think they're using the 2.0 transcripts.

9:16

They might be auto generating them themselves.

9:20

I mean, I'll take auto-generated at this point. <laugh>, I,

9:23

I will take whatever people are providing.

9:25

I think it's just a nice thing to have.

9:29

And also something that as a podcast provider,

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we felt was we were responsible for,

9:37

we saw the direction that this was going in when we decided we were gonna

9:42

do a more accessible player for everyone.

9:45

It was kind of just around the company, all of us saying,

9:48

why haven't we done this sooner? <laugh>. Right. Well, you know, the technology finally caught up with us too,

9:54

where we could do it in a, in a way that didn't break the bank and was reasonably useful.

10:00

A lot of the auto generated transcripts and captioning and stuff wasn't really

10:05

up to par. Now it's getting to the point where it's 95% good. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>.

10:11

It's made, you. Know, especially if you've got good audio. That's the other thing.

10:14

If you're doing autogenerated transcripts and your audio sucks or who knows

10:19

what, but it has a hard time with, with bad audio.

10:23

Yeah, that's a good point. I believe our partner Rev does a number of

10:30

different languages as well. Oh yeah, for sure. You have to tell it what language you're talking in, but, uh,

10:36

once you tell it, it I guess does pretty good.

10:38

I don't speak any other languages. I don't know for sure.

10:42

When we were talking about the different ways that people might want this,

10:47

that is definitely one of them. If you are not listening or they're captions in

10:54

a different language than than you speak or are familiar with,

10:58

then that's just another great way to learn something.

11:03

And of course, you gotta actively engage with your audience and learn whether they have a

11:09

specific accessibility need and just

11:14

ask for the, you know, hey, are, are you having trouble with this?

11:17

Or what could I do to make this easier for you to consume?

11:22

You know, they, you might hear from somebody and you know, they might say, Hey,

11:26

your website sucks. I can't find my way around your website or whatever they tell you.

11:30

Just engage with them. There's always ways to make it better.

11:35

Yeah. We'll include some links to just about this in general,

11:39

but also some ways that you can improve your website accessibility.

11:44

That is something that I think a lot of people are just not really considering

11:50

actively when they're working on their website.

11:53

But just like the technology has caught up for podcasting with this,

11:57

it has four websites as well and the players.

12:00

So making sure that you are providing them that easy

12:05

access is just really helpful for any podcast listener.

12:08

Yeah. I'm completely amazed by, by,

12:12

by visually impaired folks that can get away with doing the voiceover or

12:16

jaws, uh, screen readers. I,

12:19

I just as somebody that doesn't have that problem, <laugh>,

12:23

I've tried it just to see what,

12:25

what it would be like and oh man, that is,

12:31

that's a skill <laugh>. It's, it's a humbling moment.

12:34

It gives you a great appreciation for your, what they're doing,

12:40

<laugh> on a day-to-day basis. Yeah. We got, we got one of our customers that runs a whole network. Mm-Hmm.

12:45

<affirmative>. You hear the screen reader going on in the background when you're talking to him

12:50

and it's great. He's, you know,

12:54

he hears that, I don't know, but <laugh>, it's definitely a skill. Yes.

12:59

And you know, my hat's off <laugh> because I don't think I could do it as good.

13:03

Well, I probably get used to it after a while, but, uh, man, so,

13:08

but make sure that everything you're doing is as accessible as

13:13

possible. I mean, there's, there's certain things you just can't do yet,

13:17

but 'cause the technology isn't there, but, uh,

13:20

we're coming pretty close to making it universal.

13:23

Yeah. And while we're at it, the people that are consuming this content via listening

13:30

or reading or whatever at this current time,

13:33

has any suggestions of features that they would want blueberry to add change to

13:38

this podcast or just recommendations based on what you do yourself,

13:42

please tell us. We would love to continue learning about this.

13:46

Yeah. Believe it or not, it's the end of October already.

13:50

This just doesn't seem possible. But hey,

13:53

we'll see you first part of November with a new episode.

13:58

Thanks everyone. Thanks for joining us. Come back next week and in the meantime,

14:03

head to podcast insider.com for more information to subscribe, share,

14:08

and read our show notes. Check out the latest suite of services and learn how blueberry can help you

14:14

leverage your podcast. Visit blueberry.com.

14:17

That's blueberry without the ease because we can't afford to ease.