When Should You Provide Transcription?

In Benefits of Audio Transcription to Accessibility, I told you about the advantages of providing text transcripts of your site’s audio content. Now, let us take a look at when you should actually create text transcripts for your audio files. This also applies to video content in your site.

An Economical Accessibility Solution

So you have created a cool video that has spoken parts in the audio. You’ve heard about accessibility and would like to make your video accessible to persons who can’t hear it.

However, you don’t have enough resources to buy a software for closed captioning. So you try to look for free closed captioning software and find a few programs. But once you installed and tried one of the free programs, you found that, although it works, it doesn’t meet your specific needs.

In situations like this, you can simply provide a text transcript of the video or audio file. You can either place the transcript in the same page as the video or place it in another page.

YouTube’s Automated Closed Captioning Service

You may have heard that YouTube has started to provide automated closed captioning to its videos. Although this is a good service, it is done by a machine, so you may find that the captions may sometimes be inaccurate.

Also, your video may have multiple spoken languages in it, or it may have a language that is not supported by YouTube’s captioning service. In addition, there may be instances wherein you prefer to use a different video hosting service apart from YouTube. Although YouTube is the most popular video sharing site, there are still other similar online services out there which you may choose to get.

If you are in any of these scenarios, and you are pressed for cash, providing text transcripts for your video would be your best option. You can either transcribe the content yourself or hire someone who provides transcription services. Compared to closed captioning software and services, transcription services are generally less expensive.

Transcripts for Podcasts

Podcasts are an effective way to get more visitors and customers in your site. But like videos, there would be people who would like to enjoy your podcast’s content but cannot hear it.

So to ensure that everybody can understand and enjoy the message you wish to deliver in your podcasts, you may consider creating text transcripts for them. You can include these transcripts along with the option to download the podcast. Otherwise you can include the transcript in the same page where users can directly play the podcast.

Conclusion

I’d like to end this post by stating that I’m not encouraging transcription over closed captioning. Both of these are excellent tools specifically in terms of accessibility. I nonetheless believe that in certain cases, transcription is sufficient, and it can be a more affordable option too.

Also, check out our new site, The Transcription Place, offering transcription services.