What is Podcast Accessibility?

Podcast accessibility means improving the user experience for your podcasts. This is especially true for people with disabilities and others who want to understand your podcast better.

For podcast accessibility, people with disabilities can be anybody with hearing issues, or visual or cognitive impairment. They might have difficulties watching your podcast or keeping up with what you’re saying, especially if there’s no YouTube transcript.

So it’s important to improve the digital accessibility of your podcast episodes. It makes your content engaging and viable for a wider audience. This means more people will keep watching (or listening to) your podcast since you have improved the user experience for them.

Some of the most common techniques for making accessible podcasts are:

• Transcripts: A transcript is great for people with hearing issues. The Transcript provides a written document of everything that’s said and done in the podcast. It lists out what the speakers are saying and even details certain sound effects.
• Captions: Captions do the same thing but directly on the podcast video content. Automatic captions make it easier for anybody to follow along with the voice lines in the podcast. They don't always have to rely on the audio content.
• User-Friendly Interfaces: Accessible user interfaces are more about the platform where you host your podcast. Even so, making sure these platforms are easy to navigate, and support things like screen readers, alt text and magnifying text can help.
• Colour Blind-Friendly Palettes: The option to adjust colour-blind-friendly visual content can also be important. They’re not crucial for most podcasts with speakers sitting at a table. But if you have different visual content these can help.
• Multilingual Subtitles or Audio: Speakers who don’t understand your native language might have trouble listening to your podcasts. So it’s a good idea to include YouTube/multilingual subtitles or dubbed audio for them.

How YouTube Transcripts Help Podcasts Reach More People

Nowadays, making your podcasts more accessible to a wider audience is pretty straightforward. You can use things like automatic captions, YouTube transcripts and AI-generated subtitles to improve the user experience.

An extra benefit is that social media platforms also encourage this. If they see your podcasts have the right hashtags and accessibility features, they will promote your podcast even more.

This is because search engines and social media algorithms can analyse your content much better with these accessibility features. They too read the captions and transcripts to understand your content better and promote it to the right people.

Besides, these algorithms understand that podcasts with auto-captions and improved accessibility will garner more views. More viewers flooding in is also beneficial to the platform.

So generating a YouTube transcript and making your podcasts more accessible is never a bad idea. You can reach more people, get search engines and algorithms to boost you and keep the momentum going.

Use YouTube Transcripts for Creating Podcast Show Notes

Improved reach and SEO are some of the main benefits you get when improving accessibility for your podcast content. But other than that, you also have another hidden benefit: content repurposing.

By generating a YouTube transcript for your podcast, you essentially create a written description of your podcast episodes. The YouTube transcript is complete with timestamps, guest information, main takeaway points and CTAs.

So with a little extra help, you can easily convert the YouTube transcript into a set of show notes for your podcast. The transcript has all the information you need and it’s just a matter of summarising and moving a few words here and there.

These podcast show notes can also do wonders to boost your podcast. You can convert them into blog posts, and promotional material or even use them to improve accessibility further.

LiveLink can easily transcribe YouTube videos to text. See how it ranks up with other video-to-text converters.