Do It Myself Blog – Glenda Watson Hyatt

Adding audio to your website or blog adds another dimension to your content. By hearing your voice, your audience connects with you on another level and their trust increases. However, for the millions of people who are Deaf or hard of hearing (exact numbers are not easily available), this audio information is not accessible. Likewise, in this global economy, we all have accents, which may not be understandable to others. For these and other reasons, providing transcripts for all audio clips is essential to increasing your audience reach, and hence, your market size.

Darrell Hyatt from Enabling Abilities to Appear specializes in finding ways to use computer technology to unleash individuals’ abilities and passions. He offers monthly podcasts on adaptive technology, computing tips and personal observations. He has developed a process for creating transcripts for his podcasts by using the voice recognition program Dragon Naturally Speaking 9 – Preferred Version. Essentially, the process entails:

1. recording your podcast,
2. running your audio file through Dragon Naturally Speaking to create the transcription (Note: a thorough editing of the text for spelling, correct word usage (i.e. their vs there) and punctuation is a must!), and
3. editing your audio file per usual.

Darrell provides the specific settlings required and other important details in his June’s podcast, and, of course, a transcript is also available.

How to provide captioning in video will be covered in a future Accessibility 100 post.

Accessibility 100 is a series of 100 easy-to-implement, free and inexpensive tips for improving accessibility for people with disabilities. This is a community project. Feel free to leave your comments, questions and ideas for future Accessibility 100 posts.

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