Empower Your Podcast with Universal Access!

The first thing is to know what issues may be blocking users from accessing your podcast. These break down into two categories; website accessibility issues, and lack of text transcripts.
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Website issues include inaccessible keyboard navigation, poor color contrast, missing alternative text, inaccessible links and buttons and forms, and embedded audio players that aren’t accessible to blind users. Text transcripts are essential for anyone who can’t hear your podcast but would still like to access the content. A lot of people who can hear can also benefit from transcripts.

The first question to answer is how much control do you have over your website’s code? Many podcasters use web site generators like Podpage or PodcastPage which automatically render a full site from a podcast RSS feed. With these products, you select a theme for your site and that’s it. It would be nice to assume that the site created is fully accessible, but this is usually not the case. There are limited options to fix the resulting issues – but some improvements can be made – and you also have the option of choosing a good site generator in the first place. We can help with making the right choice.
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If you are building your own website from scratch, then we can help you understand how to avoid common accessibility pitfalls from the beginning. If you have a complete site already we can show you how to make it fully accessible.

Transcripts are essential for a multitude of potential consumers of your content. Deaf and hard of hearing are obviously denied access, but so are lots of other people who prefer to read content than hear it. A transcript has several advantages over just audio. It’s searchable, results in higher SEO, and many users can comprehend the content more clearly, especially if speakers have accents or the audio quality is compromised.

At New Worlds Inclusive Design, we can offer guidance on how to comply with the ADA through the WCAG guidelines. The latest current version of WCAG is 2.1 and 2.2 is coming shortly. Each spec is broken into three levels of compliance labeled A, AA, and AAA. The A level compliance is the most basic and only ensures a base level of accessibility for most forms of disability. Most sites now aim for WCAG 2.1 AA compliance, which greatly improves the experience for users with a wide range of disabilities. AAA compliance is usually only sought for specialized sites with a particular audience requiring a very high degree of accessibility. We can target any of these levels and provide an accurate professional assessment.

Our testing methodology combines automated testing with detailed manual testing with tests for keyboard accessibility, color contrast, proper image labeling, and verification of accessibility when using screen readers on multiple platforms and browsers, as well as testing on multiple devices from desktop to mobile phones.

We won't just tell you what's wrong with your website, we'll provide detailed guidance on how to fix it. Many issues are very easy to fix without coding skills. We can work with third party platforms to identify the steps required to fix many kinds of issues and bring them into compliance. For complex issues, we can recommend a remediation roadmap detailing what issues to prioritize and what approaches can be taken.