http://adactio.com/journal/1120/

He made several points:

- “It does cost money, but then so does bandwidth. Bandwidth is often covered by sponsorship or a PayPal tip jar, so why not transcriptions?”

- “By providing a transcription, you’ll also be providing a spiderable resource than can be easily scanned, quoted, cut and pasted. And you’ll get lots of whuffie.”

P.S. If speakers spent more time on transcripts, it would be not only accessible to more people like myself, but more usable for everyone to let those who prefer to skim text instead of listening to hour-long podcasts.

To Maxine:
– “Many of the speakers have even gone to the trouble of synching the audio with the slides, so it really is a lot like being there on the day: enjoy!”

Maybe they should have spent more time on getting a transcript instead so that people like myself can enjoy it, too?

- “There’s some great content here — we’d love it if you could help us spread the word about these resources in particular to people who couldn’t be there on the day, by blogging about them twittering, or just emailing the link around to all your colleagues.”

How about helping those who cannot access to “great content”?

Since Geoff Champan asked for Gian Wild’s presentation about web accessibility guidelines, I wonder if it would come with a transcript also for those who have no access to audio content?

A text is actually accessible and usable for more users than an audio file. A transcript can be easily skimmed for a few minutes while it takes hours to listen to numerous podcasts.

While we’d like to provide audio for all the tracks, there were some technical difficulties around recording the W3C track, so it’s unlikely that we’ll get audio for them.

As for the WCAG presentation, Gian Wild (that’s the presenter) hasn’t got back to us with permission to publish her talk; if she does, we’ll get it up ASAP, but for now there’s not much I can do.