Making your website more accessible is about creating a great user experience. While the internet has made it easy for people to find the information they need, the big question is: is the content accessible to everyone? A major portion of online content is in the form of multimedia content such as audio, video, podcasts, and webinars. Digital transcription, captions and subtitles make audio and video content accessible not only to people with disabilities but also to those who need it for study, to explore quotes, or just get basic information from it. Digital transcription agencies can provide high quality transcripts of different types of video content.
According to the U.S. Census Bureau, around 54 million people are living with disabilities in the U.S. In 2017, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported, “Almost one in four adults ages 20 to 69 who reported good to excellent hearing already have some hearing loss.” Catering to this audience is not only important for ethical reasons but also to maximize business potential. In other words, if you exclude people with hearing impairments from your target audience, you would be omitting a significant portion of your market. By making your audiovisual content accessible to them, you can attract more people to your website and also make them feel included.
Benefits of Making Audiovisual Content Accessible with Transcription
Transcripts or text versions of video or audio content are usually provided along with the original media and support a wide range of user needs. While basic transcripts are a text version of the speech and non-speech audio information needed to understand the content, descriptive transcripts also include a text description of the visual information needed to understand the content.
Descriptive transcripts make video content accessible for people who:
- Have hearing or visual impairments
- Wish to read, scan or search the text version of the video’s content
- Have insufficient mobile data and cannot download the media files
Providing transcripts is the only way to make the video content accessible for those who have both hearing and visual impairments. With a transcript, the content can be translated by braille devices.
Other benefits of making your media content accessible with digital transcription:
- Increase accessibility to your audio-visual content
- Make the audio and visual information meaningful to people with hearing impairments
- Make this audience feel included
- Make content accessible to people with certain psychosocial disabilities and limited intellectual abilities
- Meet ADA requirements and avoid the risk of litigation
- transcripts can be repurposed into other types of content, such as blogs, articles, slide presentations, infographics, and social media posts
Boost Search Engine Optimization with Transcription
One major benefit of making your multimedia content accessible with captions and audio transcription is that it boosts search engine optimization. In fact, transcripts have emerged as an effective SEO tactic. With transcripts, Google bots can crawl all the content in your video and understand it. Without text to accompany it, Google cannot determine the context of your multimedia content. Adding transcripts and captions to your video will make the content visible on search and boost SEO by increasing views, engagement, and search ranking.
Paginated transcripts can improve accessibility to long-form video or video that extends over 5 minutes. Long-form videos like a webinar, TV show or recorded event provide more in-depth information and have to be placed prominently at the top of the page. The long transcript of the video can be broken up and placed on separate pages. The transcription of each page should optimize with the right keywords based on the topics discussed at that particular point in the video.
Paginated transcripts will give you the opportunity to
- Target additional keywords
- Increase the overall size of your website
- Get more indexed pages and rank higher
- Increase internal cross-linking
Overall, digital transcription improves SEO and accessibility to your site in many ways. The following statistics from Search Engine People provide evidence of the SEO benefits of digital transcripts:
- After transcribing all their audio content, the radio show This American Life (TAL) found that 6.68% of search traffic is due to transcripts. TAL noted that a portion of their unique visitors who had found their site through search landed on a transcript page. The transcript pages also accounted for a 4.36% increase in inbound traffic and a 3.89% increase in inbound links.
- Two other studies reported that pages that had transcripts earned on average 16% more revenue than those that did not have transcripts. It was also found that Youtube videos with captions earned 7.32% more views overall.
If you have the time, you can transcribe your media content yourself using a transcription tool. On the other hand, when quality and time are the prime considerations, professional transcription services are definitely the better option. An expert can provide you with accurate and in-depth transcriptions that can go a long way in making your website more accessible.
