- It’s not possible to fast forward podcasts or slow down speech of someone who’s mumbling or speaking fast. If you want to listen to the full speech, you would have to listen for the exact amount of time the speaker was talking for. Also, you can’t see where in podcast you can listen the specific section of speech.

- It’s easier to handle the pace of reading transcripts. Depending on your preference, you can read either fast or slow. You can easily find the sections of the text to reread without guessing where it is.

- While text versions benefits those with hearing loss most, they are useful for anyone else.

Benson, thanks, for sharing your view as a hearing person about your preference for transcripts over podcasts. So it is not just us deaf and hard of hearing who benefit from transcripts. According to COAT Position Statement on video captioning (it applies to audio transcriptions as well):

“… Who will benefit [from captions]? Over 100 million Americans, including 28 million individuals with hearing loss, 30 million people for whom English is a second language, 27 million illiterate adults, 12 million children learning how to read and 4 million remedial readers. …”

Not to mention millions more worldwide..

Examples of those other people are my parents and foreign friends with perfect hearing who also find captioning for TV useful since English isn’t their first language. They also say it’s easier for them to read written English than to try to understand it in spoken format.

Transcripts would greatly benefit website owners as well since they improve the site’s search ranking.

I did my accessibility presentation at a recent conference covering all those issues.