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Insider, hosted by Mike Dell. Todd Cochrane and Mackenzie Bennett
from the Blueberry Team bring you weekly insights, advice, and insider
tips and tricks to help you start, grow and thrive through podcasting. All with the support of your team
here at Blueberry Podcasting. Welcome. Let's dive in. I'm Mackenzie Bennett, marketing
specialist at Blueberry. And. I'm Mike Deve, VP of Customer
Relations here at Blueberry. And today we're going to explore the
ways that you can make your podcast more accessible. This is something that Blueberry
has been kind of focused on always in the back of our minds, of how podcasts can be more
accessible to any type of audience that a podcaster might have. And there's a lot of different aspects
that go into it from the content that you are creating yourself to how we
can help in the distribution end. First things first, we wanna make sure that people
understand accessibility in general. Right? And, and part of the aspects of
accessibility is also from the creation side. We have lots of blind podcasters that
use our services and whenever they bring up something that they
find it's not accessible, that stop, drop and roll, that becomes priority one here
because we want to make sure that anybody that wants to
use our stuff as best we can, can use our stuff. And it goes the
same way as creating your own podcast. You want as many people to be able
to consume the content as possible. Yeah. First things first, people are
always just focused on the audio content. Considering for, for what it is,
podcasting is mainly audio. However, it, it does go more, it expands
into that. There is video, there is captions and transcripts. There's just a wide variety of
ways that it can expand just for anyone to be able to get
the content in some type of way. So some of those ways are hearing
impairments, visual impairments, specifically if you're
doing like a video podcast, and just overall some cognitive
impairments that people have, whether it's greeting and writing
and just understanding in general. So creating that accessible
content. First things first, we want people to use clear and
concise language within their shows. Yes. And using jargon,
we have the habit, uh, especially us geeks. Uh,
have the problem of, of using a lot of, a lot of short, what do you call that? Uh,
geez, I'm drawing a blank
turn on the recording here. And I, I lose my brain. . Avoiding acronyms or aggregation. Acronym. That's the word I
was trying to find. . Yeah. Those types of things. I mean, it, it does make sense depending
on the niche of your podcast, includes some of those
things because the people, if they're most likely listening,
are also privy to those words. Yeah. And they're trying, they're
trying to learn too. So if you exactly use the
acronym acronym, you can, uh, define it in your show as well that that
helps people learn those acronyms if they're used in your subject matter. Yeah. It's really just use it in a way that's
understanding and open as opposed to very, uh, I don't know,
kind of like condescending. So definitely something else that we want
people to think about is having clear and consistent audio quality that
just makes things so much easier on the listener end. Yeah. There's nothing worse than
listening to a playlist of podcasts. They're listening to your back catalog
and one episode is really low and they gotta crank their volume up and then
the next one comes on and it blows their ears out. Yeah. And also the fact that a lot
of the time podcasts are listened to while people are moving. So
any type of transportation, like I know I have to crank all of
my podcasts up when I'm in the car. Just in general, being on the
highway, same with, you know, if someone's on the subway, it's loud,
it's, you know, things are moving. So that really helps as well. Yeah, for sure. One of the things for the hearing impaired
that you might want to consider is transcripts. We are big fans of those here. Yeah. We have a service here that
can do transcripts and, but you can also do them yourself
or hire some other place, but make it so that the
transcripts are easily found. Like our player has transcripts
available and if you have that it, somebody that's totally deaf, they're just gonna wanna
read the transcript. But say you have low hearing
or maybe English isn't your first language, it's good to have the captions
on while it's playing so that you, if you didn't quite hear
it right or something like that, that's there. So we have that
service through our partner Rev. And then you can add it to a
video podcast content as well. Chrome browser. If someone's watching a video on the
Chrome browser or listening to audio for that matter, it'll auto
caption if you said it right. Yeah, I know YouTube does that. Almost the majority of social
media places will do it too. Yeah, I sometimes turn it on if the audio
quality's a little bit goofy or I don't wanna make a lot of noise, I'll turn the volume way down and
read the captions. Sometimes it's, it's worth doing, even if you're
not, uh, hearing impaired. It's, it's just very,
very popular nowadays. You see it all over on
any social media post. And then we're, we're really happy to
be able to provide our rev partner, our transcript partner and, and include the transcripts as part
of our audio player as well for any blueberry hosting customer.
But it's also really, really helpful for video podcasts.
Like if people are doing that, you kind of just expect it
to be added at this point. For the visually impaired. You wanna have descriptive
audio and alternate texts on any posts with the, with
pictures or whatever. Mm-Hmm. in our postings, any type
of images that we have on our website, we do the alt text for. So I mean, I will, I will admit I'm not necessarily the
best at creating a long alt text, but I do include one for every image
that I add. It's just like a simple, here's what you're looking at if you
are not actually looking at it . And that's also helpful with SEO
and I think the descriptive audio, which is just a verbal description
of like what is happening, whether it's live or
being spoken about. So. Yeah. And that's just generally a
nice thing to do if you're doing a, a video and an audio
version of your podcast. Don't forget the audio
people that will, it happens. A lot with live recordings, like live
shows at a venue or something like that. And it's like people are
discussing something, but people just listening have no
idea what they're looking at. Yeah. Hey, look at this picture. You don't
wanna do that in an audio podcast. Yeah. Describe what you're looking at and
that that helps both for visually impaired people and people
just listen to the audio of it. So definitely wanna do
that. Of course. Again, we talked about the blueberry player
having the accessibility built in as well as a lot of the social
media apps. They should, should be aware of accessibility
and a player design, say a, uh, a visually impaired person. If
they can't find the play button, then your player sucks 'cause
they're using screen readers. So make sure that it's
accessible that way. And also make sure you've got some
sort of transcript available or cla captioning or whatever for
those hearing impaired. Do you know of any
podcast apps that include transcriptions or if any
of the podcasting 2.0 more up-to-date apps are
doing something for this? Yeah, a lot of the podcast 2.0
apps, pod verse and Fountain and, and quite a few others do use the
transcript right there in the app. So you can kind of follow it along. Like on Spotify you can
click on lyrics and it'll, it'll show you the lyrics of the
song you're listening to. Well, this does exactly the same
thing in a podcast app, but I don't think any of the mainstream
ones are doing it yet. Maybe Spotify, I don't know for sure though, and I don't think they're
using the 2.0 transcripts. They might be auto
generating them themselves. I mean, I'll take auto-generated
at this point. , I, I will take whatever people are providing. I think it's just a nice thing to have. And also something that
as a podcast provider, we felt was we were responsible for, we saw the direction that this was
going in when we decided we were gonna do a more accessible player for everyone. It was kind of just around
the company, all of us saying, why haven't we done this sooner? . Right. Well, you know, the technology
finally caught up with us too, where we could do it in a, in a way that didn't break the
bank and was reasonably useful. A lot of the auto generated transcripts
and captioning and stuff wasn't really up to par. Now it's getting to the point where
it's 95% good. Mm-Hmm. . It's made, you. Know, especially if you've got
good audio. That's the other thing. If you're doing autogenerated transcripts
and your audio sucks or who knows what, but it has a hard
time with, with bad audio. Yeah, that's a good point. I believe our partner Rev does a number of different languages as well. Oh yeah, for sure. You have to tell it
what language you're talking in, but, uh, once you tell it, it I
guess does pretty good. I don't speak any other
languages. I don't know for sure. When we were talking about the different
ways that people might want this, that is definitely one of them. If you are not listening
or they're captions in a different language than than
you speak or are familiar with, then that's just another
great way to learn something. And of course, you gotta actively engage with your
audience and learn whether they have a specific accessibility need and just ask for the, you know, hey, are,
are you having trouble with this? Or what could I do to make
this easier for you to consume? You know, they, you might
hear from somebody and you
know, they might say, Hey, your website sucks. I can't find my way around your
website or whatever they tell you. Just engage with them. There's
always ways to make it better. Yeah. We'll include some links
to just about this in general, but also some ways that you can
improve your website accessibility. That is something that I think a lot of
people are just not really considering actively when they're
working on their website. But just like the technology has
caught up for podcasting with this, it has four websites as
well and the players. So making sure that you are
providing them that easy access is just really helpful
for any podcast listener. Yeah. I'm completely amazed by, by, by visually impaired folks that can
get away with doing the voiceover or jaws, uh, screen readers. I, I just as somebody that doesn't
have that problem, , I've tried it just to see what, what it would be like and oh man, that is, that's a skill . It's, it's a humbling moment. It gives you a great appreciation
for your, what they're doing, on a day-to-day basis. Yeah. We got, we got one of our customers
that runs a whole network. Mm-Hmm. . You hear the screen reader going on in
the background when you're talking to him and it's great. He's, you know, he hears that, I don't know, but
, it's definitely a skill. Yes. And you know, my hat's off because
I don't think I could do it as good. Well, I probably get used to it
after a while, but, uh, man, so, but make sure that everything
you're doing is as accessible as possible. I mean, there's, there's
certain things you just can't do yet, but 'cause the technology
isn't there, but, uh, we're coming pretty close
to making it universal. Yeah. And while we're at it, the people that are consuming
this content via listening or reading or whatever
at this current time, has any suggestions of features that they
would want blueberry to add change to this podcast or just recommendations
based on what you do yourself, please tell us. We would love
to continue learning about this. Yeah. Believe it or not, it's
the end of October already. This just doesn't seem possible. But hey, we'll see you first part of
November with a new episode. Thanks everyone. Thanks for joining us. Come back
next week and in the meantime, head to podcast insider.com for more
information to subscribe, share, and read our show notes. Check out the latest suite of services
and learn how blueberry can help you leverage your podcast.
Visit blueberry.com. That's blueberry without the ease
because we can't afford to ease.