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Transcripts on the Web:
Getting people to your podcasts and videos

It's easy and relatively inexpensive for website developers to provide transcripts for multimedia. In many cases transcripts are required by law to provide access to information for people who are deaf or hard of hearing. Transcripts are an SEO silver bullet for audio and video, and bring more people to your podcast, videos, and website.

Benefits: More people get your audio and video info with transcripts online

People who might not listen to the audio or watch the video

• People who are deaf or hard of hearing.
• People who won't spend the time to listen to the audio or watch the video, but will skim a transcript.
• People who have difficulty processing auditory information, for example, because of cognitive disability.
• People who are not proficient in the language who find it easier to read than listen.
• People with low bandwidth connections who don't want to download the larger audio or video file.
• People who pay for bandwidth usage and thus don't want to download the larger audio or video file. This is often an issue with phones and other mobile devices.
• People who cannot play the audio because they are in a noisy environment and they can't hear it.
• People who cannot play the audio because they are in a quiet environment and they don't want to disturb others.

More traffic to your info

• SEO - search engine optimization. Search engines can index the transcript much better than audio or video.
• It's easier for people to link to a transcript than some audio or video files.
• It's easier for people to pull a quote from a text file than try to create one from the audio or video.

Some Supporting Data

8 Benefits of Transcribing & Captioning Videos links to supporting data, for example:

• Research Study of Closed Captions & Transcripts found that 71% of students without hearing difficulties use captions, primarily to help them focus and retain information.
• Case Study: This American Life found that 7.23% of visitors viewed at least one transcript, unique visitors increased 4.18%, and new inbound links to transcript accounted for an increase of 3.89%.

How to get or make transcripts

Options for getting a transcript include: paying someone to make the transcript (which is usually the best option), using speech recognition software, and typing the transcript yourself.

Pay someone to make the transcript, transcription services

There are many commercial services that transcribe audio files and provide the transcript in HTML format. Costs depend on quality and turn-around time, which ranges from hours to weeks. You can get a decent English transcript starting at $1.00 per minute of audio – e.g., $10.00 for a 10-minute podcast.

It's best to proof-read the transript to ensure that it is accurate. Some services have high accuracy, and some have lower accuracy.

To cut down on your editing effort, provide the transcriptionist a list of names, acronyms, abbreviations, technical words, jargon, and anything else they might not recognize in the audio.

See the transcription services page.

Use audio-to-text service

There are now many free and for-a-fee online serivces that will generate a transcript for you, including YouTube. These will almost always require a lot of editing to correct mistakes.

Use speech recognition software

Using speech recognition software, such as Dragon NaturallySpeaking, might be a viable option if you have a lot of media with a single speaker, such as a regular podcast that is mostly you speaking. Such software requires "training" for a particular voice, so if your audio is interviews with different people, this won't work as well. Keep in mind that any software-only option will require some editing to correct mistakes.

Type the transcript yourself

Unless you are an excellent typist, doing it yourself is likely to be frustrating. It's probably worth paying someone else to do it. If you do it yourself, plan for it to take at least three times as long as the audio to type it up – e.g., half an hour for a 10-minute podcast.

There is free software that can help by slowing down the text and providing easy pause buttons, such as Express Scribe Transcription Playback Software.

Best practices

Best practices for the audio

• Include visual information in the audio.
  Ensure all relevant audio information is included in the recording.
  For example, in presentations:
  • Instead of pointing to a slide and saying, "as you can see on this slide, the traffic peaked here", say, "this chart of website traffic for the last year shows that it peaked in August."
  • If you do show-of-hands (e.g., "How many people follow WCAG 2.0?"), say the results for the audio recording (e.g., "about half").
  • Repeat questions that are not picked up by the audio recording.
• Get good quality audio recording. Better quality means a better and cheaper transcript. Most transcription services charge extra for low quality audio.

Best practices for the transcript

• Include in the transcript:
  • Speakers names.
  • All speech content. If there is speech that is not relevant, it is usually best to indicate that it has been excluded from the transcript, e.g.: "[participants discuss the weather while the presenter reboots his computer]".
  • Relevant information about the speech, usually in brackets, e.g.: "Joe: I hate this computer! [shouted]"
  • Relevant non-speech audio in parentheses, lowercase, italics, with a space before and after, e.g.: "( computer crashing into bits and parts sliding across the floor )". Non-relevant background noise can be left out of the transcript.
• Indicate the speaker(s) for optimum usability, for example:
  • For an informal podcast transcript with multiple speakers, it's probably best to use speakers' full names the first time, and then just their first names.
  • When there are multiple speakers, use hanging indents to make it easy to skim for a particular speaker. You can even use CSS and give each speaker a different color or style. (Make sure you also include names so there is redundant color coding.)
  • When the focus should be on the interviewee's answers and not the interviewer, you could format the interviewers questions in smaller, lighter text so the interviewee's answers stand out more clearly.
• Edit according to situation:
  • In some cases, such as legal depositions, the transcript must be verbatim, including ums, ahs, and indicating pauses.
  • For most podcasts, presentations, and such, minor edits for readability are appropriate. For example, it would generally be OK to edit: "The success criteria in WCAG 1.0 - I mean in WCAG 2.0 - are more clear and testable." to: "The success criteria in WCAG 2.0 are more clear and testable."
  • It is not appropriate to change the meaning from the audio. Likewise, it is usually not appropriate to significantly correct grammar or other mistakes.
• Add navigation and clarifications:
  • Add headings and links where it will make the transcript more usable, e.g., added links in short podcast transcript and added headings in long presentation transcript. This also helps with SEO.
  • It is generally acceptable to add clarifying information, as long as it is clear that it is not part of the actual audio, e.g., words added to a paragraph put in [brackets], or separate sections with headings "Introduction", "Transcript", "Resources".
• Make it easy for people to get the transcript online:
  • Provide the transcript in HTML for maximum accessibility to people and to search engines, and for reuse.
  • Provide a link to the transcript wherever the audio or video is available.
  • With the transcript, provide a link to the audio or video file.

Bottom line: Transcripts are required

Podcasts, videos, and other audio files must include a transcript in order to be accessible to people who are deaf or hard of hearing. If you don't provide a transcript for your audio files, you are discriminating against some people, preventing them from getting the information.

Providing a text alternative for your audio is required by law in some cases; in others, it's just the smart thing to do.

• WCAG 2.1 Guideline 1.1: "Provide text alternatives for any non-text content so that it can be changed into other forms people need, such as large print, braille, speech, symbols or simpler language."
• WCAG 2.1 Guideline 1.2: "Provide alternatives for time-based media."
  • Success Criteria 1.2.1 says: "Prerecorded Audio-only: An alternative for time-based media is provided that presents equivalent information for prerecorded audio-only content."
  • Success Criteria 1.2.9 says: "Audio-only (Live) An alternative for time-based media that presents equivalent information for live audio-only content is provided."
• "U.S. Section 508 1194.22, Paragraph A: "A text equivalent for every non-text element shall be provided (e.g., via "alt," "longdesc," or in element content)." The Guide to the Section 508 Standards for Electronic and Information Technology states: "A non-text element is an image, graphic, audio clip, or other feature that conveys meaning through a picture or sound. Examples include... embedded or streaming audio" and "If the presentation is audio only, a text transcript would meet this requirement."

Beyond transcripts — Captions

For most podcasts, audio-only files, and "talking head" videos, a transcript is sufficient to provide minimum accessibility.

Captions are the text synchronized with the audio. Captions are important when people need to see what's happening in the video and get the audio information in text at the same time.

Even with videos that are only talking heads, it's nice to have captions so that a person who is deaf or hard of hearing can see facial expressions. Some people will even appreciate captions for audio-only files, for example, if they are hard of hearing or non-native speakers and would like to listen yet also have the text to fill in what they can't hear or understand.

When you provide captions, it is good to also provide a transcript in order to provide the benefits of transcripts to users, and reap the benefits yourself.

Sign language is useful for some people who are deaf. (Here are some neat videos that offer sign language option.)

For more info, see:

• W3C Multimedia Accessibility FAQ
• Time-based Media: Understanding Guideline 1.2

Resources and References

You are welcome to quote or link to this material if you clearly include the reference:

Transcripts on the Web. Henry, Shawn Lawton. 2019. http://www.uiaccess.com/transcripts/transcripts_on_the_web.html

Comments and Contributions

Comments on and contributions to this page are very welcome! [email protected]

 

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© Copyright 2001-2019 Shawn Lawton Henry

Sponsored in part by: