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Accessibility Toolkit for Open Educational Resources (OER): Podcasts

Accessibility guide for creating OER

Podcast Accessibility

Podcasts are a great tool to use in OER. Podcasts can be used in different types of courses and for different types of users and learners. Podcasts are great for self-paced learning, for reinforcing ideas taught in class, for flipped classrooms, for multilingual students, for including guest speakers and for providing enhanced teaching and learning environment. If you are going to use a podcast in your OER then you need to make your podcast accessible. Not only will this allow your content to be accessible to people with disabilities it will also help you reach a wider audience.
When creating a podcast keep these things in mind:

Add transcripts of the podcasts.
Pick an accessible media player.

How to Make Podcasts Accessible

Transcripts

Providing transcripts to your podcasts is the most important thing you can do to increase your podcast’s accessibility. In addition, many users benefit from the transcripts, not just those with a disability. Transcripts provide users (and creators) a way to search the podcasts for specific content. In addition, many users might want to listen and follow along reading the transcript as a way to better learn the material. Also, users can user the transcripts to write notes etc. regarding the topic. The best way to provide a transcript is inline on the OER’s page itself, but you can also provide downloadable or linked transcripts.

Creating and displaying transcripts for podcasts
Nicolas Steenhout, who runs A11y Rules Podcast, a show about web accessibility, has created a very useful website on Podcasts and Accessibility. Here is his page on how to create transcripts for your podcast.

Unless otherwise noted, these accessibility guides were created by Accessibility Librarian Amy Wolfe for CUNY and are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. If you re-use, remix or link to this guide, it would be appreciated if you could notify the creator Accessibility Librarian Amy Wolfe.

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Office of Library Services | CUNY Accessibility