[MUSIC IN - GHOSTHOOD FEATURING SARA AZRIEL “LET’S GO” BEGINS]
What are we looking for when trying to make a quality transcript to create an accessible podcast? Does it have to involve AI? Lots of AI these days from voice, text, productivity, things like taking meeting notes for you or creating graphics. There's no shortage of AI, and especially in the podcasting world, because we're looking for that productivity and also keeping costs low. So in some ways, we have to embrace it. But can we be involved in ways that can be helpful to others and not just teach robots to take over the world? How does AI affect accessibility for podcasting?
So today we're talking through ways of having equitable access for podcasts with Joel McKinnon. Joel started out as a front end developer for about 20 years, and then an accessibility engineer and consultant for the past five, and that's where I saw him on LinkedIn. He was talking specifically about accessibility for podcasts, and he's a podcaster. So I knew I wanted to hear his perspective on what's changing and challenging for podcasters in the industry.
Whether all of this technology will be for the dark side or maybe a force to a better world, who knows at this point? But as a little bit of a sci-fi geek myself, I was drawn to his podcast Seldon Crisis, which focuses on the novel foundation by Isaac Asimov. And then also on my radio Geek side, I found his other passion project really interesting. It's a rock opera, which is also a musician. So he wrote and performed this rock opera called Planet and Sky. And of course, being a podcaster, also has an accompanying podcast.
So with both of our worlds and interests colliding together, we had no shortage of things to talk. But what I loved best about this conversation for you was his optimistic view of AI, looking at the potential of the future. And as he said to me, after we stopped hitting that record button, “it's all about what we can dream it to be”, I like that perspective. So make sure you tune in to the end when we talk more about his podcasting journey and his perspective on AI for your own podcast.
This is episode number 79 with Joel McKinnon on The Podcaster's Guide to a Visible Voice. << WOMAN SINGS: So so so so let’s go >> Joel, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast. We're gonna have so much to talk about.
[INTRO MUSIC ENDS]
Thank you so much for being here.
I'm really happy to be here.
I was doing so much more research and stuff on, you know, accessibility and transcripts, because, as you know, Apple Podcast has released the ability for transcripts in their app earlier this year in 2024. And so the big focus here is those text alternatives to coincide with audio.
And so I found you on LinkedIn. You were talking about accessibility and transcripts for podcasts, and I felt like our lives were aligning. So what do you see as the current landscape of accessibility in podcasting right now?
Well, it's changing very quickly. I come from an accessibility background as an accessibility engineer, and used to be a front end web developer. Now I am a podcaster with a lot of knowledge about accessibility, and I can see that the landscape is changing very quickly. Just when I started my podcast a few years ago, nobody had transcripts or very few people had transcripts, and nobody had accessible websites even, you know, there were a lot of problems the last three or four years. It's really improved a lot in that the website generators for podcasting, um, are much more accessible than they used to be.
And like, everybody's talking about transcripts, and that's great. I mean just even a year ago I'd go to a conference and nobody, I felt like I was the only one who cared about transcripts. And now it's like everybody's making it a big feature on their platform, the hosts, the podcast hosting services, mine, the one I use, Transistor, suddenly has this really nice way to edit your transcript very quickly. And uh, it's just so much simpler than it used to be.
Oh yeah, because you actually have to listen. Hit pause, hit play, hit pause, type, type, type and do that whole manual part. But we also have the AI portion too, which we'll talk more about later. But with going back to transcripts, and let's focus on that for a little bit. What do you see though, even with all these improvements now, what is still lacking in today's transcripts?
It's so cheap and easy to do an AI transcript that a lot of people just leave it that way. And uh, the way I look at it is we care as podcasters a lot about our audio and you know, how engaging our audio is. And for the people who can't listen to audio and have to read it, or just prefer to read it, why should we give them garbage and something that's really difficult to get through?
So I kind of try to put myself in their position and like, think, what would it be like if you could only read this? And right now I think the biggest problem is there's a lot more transcripts showing up, but they're not that readable. And you know, there's a lot of embarrassing, kind of misspelled names of the guest or the host or whatever. And or whatever important words in the, you know, whatever the subject area is.
Yeah, like we actually have one of our clients, um, every time she says the podcast name itself, and I think it's just, you know, she's saying it really quickly, the AI transcript changes it each and every time. So even like, it gets the name of your podcast wrong. And how does that make you feel? You know, like, it's your brand and it is totally incorrect.
Yeah. Uh, my podcast is named Seldon Crisis, named for a character, Hari Seldon with an N on the end. And it's always seldom.
Exactly.
Or every time I use talk, uh, about Isaac Asimov, who wrote the series that I'm talking about, it's Asamof, Asimof, Amisov, there's lots of variations on it, some that aren't kind of even NFSW. So, it's a lot of work, or it used to be.
I mean even today, a common practice now with the use of AI to generate a transcript to simplify that workflow a little bit, you still have to go in there to manually edit that document, that transcript. So how does this differ from what you're proposing about improving transcripts?
Well, it's how well those tools work and what they can do largely because of AI involvement in them. Now there's a lot more granular approach to using AI than just that one sweep through the whole thing and then going in and editing everything manually. I use something called Fanfare and it's when I used it, it basically did that.
It created, did one big sweep and then you'd go through and change the things it had. But now what it's got is you hit a button and it shows you, like, for every text block, it shows you an AI transcription of it, and so, from the original, like an improvement of the original AI transcription.
And you can take it like, block by block and look at it and see, does this work? Does everything look good in this? If it does, then you can just accept that. If not, you throw it away or you edit it and then you accept it and you can go through it really quickly. And now you can do it in where it used to take like three times the length of the audio playing out to go through and create your transcript. Now you can do it in like one and a half, which is not that bad.
The best thing is, that I see about making a quality transcript, is that it's possible to make quality transcripts with a little bit of effort now and you can be proud of them. There is something you can market your podcast with. You can send out links to it. You could say, check this out, read through this. This is great.
And a lot of people like to do that, you know, take the time to just read a little bit of it before they would actually listen to the whole thing. It's an investment in your time to listen to a whole podcast that you’ve never heard before.
Exactly. It's that little investment piece for your listener to scan and see. Is this something I want to listen to? But what about from that accessibility standpoint though?
Well, the accessibility standpoint is that there's something called equitable access. It's the first principle of inclusive design. The idea is that if you think about the built environment, like a person who uses a wheelchair shouldn't have to go to like, a back entrance and come in through a dingy alley or something to get to where they want to go, they should be able to have just as nice an experience as somebody who's able to just walk in. And with podcasts it's the same thing.
The audio experience is one thing that you put a lot of effort into, and a person who can't listen to it, who is disabled and can't listen to it, really deserves to have a quality experience. So, that's the biggest reason for accessibility and why accessibility matters, you know, human dignity.
Yeah, I think a lot of people when they're podcasting, they're like, I'll have a website because it's good for SEO. But what about the website accessibility part?
Yeah, the way I like to think about it is, two main groups of accessibility needs is like, people who are visually disabled and people who are auditorily disabled. Right? And if you can't listen, you know, you need a transcript, but if your vision is fine, you can probably use most websites and find the audio and listen to it.
But if you are blind or have really low vision, and you can't even get to where the audio is, you're never going to hear it. And those are the people who would really benefit the most from being able to listen to a podcast. So it’s, you need to handle both of those. You need to make sure that the website is fully accessible for a person with low vision.
And then there's a lot of different kinds of disabilities in between. The cognitive disability is a major one where you might see the website, you might be able to get to the website, but you can't follow it, you can't get through it very well, or, you know, there's problems with things like dyslexia. Ah. Where if the words are confusing or whatever.
There's colourblind people who can't access the controls as well, you know, if you have stuff on there that's red and is supposed to be meaningful, that it's red, it's a problem or something, or an error message, and it doesn't show up as red for a colorblind person, that can be a problem. So those are all the basic things that you want to cover. And most of the website generators are getting pretty good now.
One little problem is customizability in that, a lot of them now allow you to change your colors any way you want. And so it's quite possible to change your colours in a bad way. Might be fine for a fully sighted person. A lot of graphic designers like to do these soft pastels and stuff, right? And sometimes that's a problem if you're in an environment with the sun on your screen or something and you can't see the type because it's too soft. So contrast is really important.
Yeah. I mean, even for me, a sighted person, something not related to podcasting. But I went to the store to buy this cream. I have some eczema sometimes, and so I was like, oh this cream is supposed to be great. I'll go look for it. And I actually couldn't read what was on the bottle because it was a white bottle with like lemon yellow print.
Oh, yeah.
Could not read anything on there. I'm like, they actually passed this and it's on the shelf. Ah, it's amazing.
Yeah. A great example, Apple is really good at accessibility, but I don't understand. On my iPhone, when I look at the control center, the main thing I open the control center for usually is to see my battery strength. And it's in very light type against a gray background. And I usually can't even read it. So that's not helpful. I need to talk to Apple about that.
Apple, get on that. So let's switch to your podcasting journey. Why did you first decide to start a podcast and become a podcaster?
Yeah, I'm a musician and I play bass guitar and I, I wrote a rock opera, like 15 years ago or something. Yeah. Really crazy thing about science fiction creation myth thing where a planet falls in love with its atmosphere. It's pretty out there. And I wrote lyrics for it. And the lyrics are kind of cryptic because you can only get so much into the lyrics of nine songs. And so I had this feeling like people really aren't going to understand this story just from listening to these lyrics. So I created a podcast to go into the deeper story. And basically it gave me an opportunity to like, create a whole science fiction story in text, you know, to explain it all.
And I got a really nice, really my favorite podcast voice is a guy named Doug Metzger, does Literature and History, one of my favourite podcasts. And I had met him and he had asked me once if he could help in any way. We get started on this, I said, maybe if you could read it. And he actually did. He read the entire thing for nothing. He was just wonderful guy. So that was my first podcast.
What was that one called?
It's called Planet and Sky.
Okay, we will look that one up and make sure to put it in the show notes because I'm intrigued.
Yeah, Planet and Sky: The Deeper Story, because the original was Planet and Sky: A Cosmic Love Story, was the name of the album.
That's one of the things I love about podcasting. There are so many niche topics that people can find you.
Right, right. There's not that many audio drama things like that. But what was interesting is I was an accessibility person already at that point, and it was really easy to make it accessible because I had all the scripts written out and I could just post them and that was not a problem and that was fine.
But then later I decided to do another podcast that was just a limited nine episode podcast. But later I decided to do this one on Isaac Asimov's foundation because its just a wonderful story. I loved it. I wanted to share it with everybody and find other people who loved it. So I decided to make a podcast for it.
And that one started out with having pre-scripted episodes. But uh, very quickly I got into wanting to talk to people and I brought in guests like a philosopher, a scientist, had a couple of space scientists, had science fiction writers, had fans who were writing fan fiction, all sorts of different kinds of guests to come on.
And I learned very quickly that it's really hard to make the transcript because one thing is, I speak pretty clearly and legibly when I have a script in front of me, but when I'm just talking off the cuff like I am now, and then I look at my words later transcribed, they're a mess and it's often a lot of hums and huhs. And you know, different repeated words and things. Yeah.
Ah, people don't speak grammatically…
Exactly, exactly.
…It's not the written language.
And it’s a chore to read it, you know. So there are a lot of ways you can improve that now, with AI, I basically made that exploration of how to improve that over time. And now I have a pretty good system for going through and grooming the AI transcript and turning it into a nice presentation that you can follow pretty well. And it doesn't look so embarrassing what the host is stumbling over. Yeah, I don't care about the guests, but the host I'm really concerned about.
[LAUGHTER]
Gotta look good. Gotta look good on the Internet.
Yeah.
And with your podcast, though, like you said, that you've got a good system going, but, you know, just looking on your website now, it's been on pause since 2023. And I know we were talking about there's always personal issues and life, and for every podcaster, there are challenges. But take us through your challenges of creating these episodes.
Yeah, typically, you know, like any podcaster, it's a little bit different. I have like, three different kinds of episodes for Seldon Crisis. The main kind is a story episode, and that's like a little audio drama in itself, because I do commentary and analysis, but I also do like voice acting of the different parts.
And when I started, it was all me, there were just a few voices that I had to throw in there but later, he introduces female characters, and I didn't want to touch that, so I hired another podcaster to do the female parts. She was wonderful. And then it turns out her husband was also a voice actor who was brilliant. So I hired him to do some parts, and another podcaster did another. I ended up with a troop of people doing these…
Wow.
…it was, it was great. But a lot of work, a lot of work to get a nice transcript out. Those started from a script, but they still require a lot of work to get the speaker labeling. And you also need to throw in some audio descriptions because there are sounds that matter when you're listening to it. There's sound effects in there, and you want to have that be part of the transcript so people get the full experience as much as possible. So that was another step that I had learned how to put in. Again, I used this tool called Fanfare that made it really easy. Then how do you host them?
Yeah, so you're talking about your podcast host providing you a free podcast.
Yeah, my podcast host is Transistor, and they're really good. They now have transcript, editing feature and customizable pages and everything.
What about if it's a self created WordPress, Squarespace? Because I think a lot of my clients host, like, they've created their own website instead of using the one from their host, and so…
For Planet and Sky, I created my own website. It's a really nice website that I put a lot of work into, but it was like I had to create a page for each episode and there were only nine episodes. So I put a lot of work into every page. But when I got to Seldon Crisis and I'm doing one every couple weeks, uh, you know, I just don't want to take the time to have to build it all every time.
So a website creator like Podpage is great for that because all it takes is the RSS feed and you just set up a template and choose your colors and your theme and then it's going to do all the work for you. And, you know, as soon as you publish the audio, as soon as it's in the RSS feed, you've got a web page and it's pretty much there. So now it's just a matter of like, adding in those links to the transcript, things like that.
Yeah, it's nice to streamline that workflow. And I know that sometimes is a challenge for podcasters where they're like, there's, the workflow is just massive. There's so much to do, there's so many details. And then podcast fading, they fade and go to, you know, podcasting abyss.
Yeah.
So what, what do you think you need to change for you to create new episodes again?
Uh, well, actually before we talked today, you told me about something that I'm going to take to heart. You said you take a break every once in a while. You have a scheduled break every once in a while and I never thought of that.
That's a great idea because if you're like, kind of on, like, self commanded to put out an episode every two weeks for the rest of your life, it becomes kind of a hanging over your head and after a while you rebel and just say, yeah, get away from this. I want to just go for a long bike ride or something. I don't want to do an episode today. Uh, so I love that idea.
And I'm going to start, you know, I've taken a year break, but I think I'm going to, when I resume, I'm going to have like, a more sensible pattern that gives me some time off now and then.
Yeah, when you put it that way, like a podcast a week for life, that is pretty daunting. And so, like, I know for me, whenever I'm helping someone launch a podcast as well, I'm always telling them, you know, podcasting is a long haul. And so how are you going to build the schedule so that it fits within your capacity.
Because if your listeners know when you have a break, they will always come back to the show. It's, I kind of equate it to, like, TV. You know, like when people did watch regular broadcast TV, you know, like back in the day when there was Thursday, it was Friends and Seinfeld, and, you know, those shows were on…
They weren't on year long, year round.
…Exactly…
They took a break.
…They always took a break. So, yeah, I encourage you to take that break and figure out what would best fit for yourself and your listeners as well.
Yeah. One thing, this is kind of philosophical about it, I guess, is that I think one of the things that makes you feel that pressure, one of the things I learned, really, earlier I heard repeated over and over again by people advising, you know, that it always seems like the big objective is to continually increase your listeners to. That's, that's like the holy grail. How can I get my listener count up?...
Grow, grow, grow.
…and, like, one of the maxims I heard was have a regular cadence that you never change. So right away you've put that Sword of Damocles over your head, you know, you, as soon as you do that and, you know, all in the interest of continually growing your listener base.
But, you know, if you can't handle it and you break and you take a year off, your listener base is probably going to suffer. Right? So you want it to be something fun and something that's good for your life, you know, something that fits in your life. I like quality listeners, not quantity, you know? So quality listeners to me are people who get back to me and tell me how much they like the show.
That's always the best part. It feels like a surprise each time when it happens. You're like, oh, someone's actually listening.
Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. I've had so many wonderful interactions as a podcaster, and it's changed my life to become a podcaster, just to expand how many people I'm working with and interacting with around the world. You know, there are people in, like, 100 countries who've listened to my podcast, and it just blows my mind that people in countries I've never even heard of are listening to my podcast.
Yeah, it's like those closet fans, right?
Yeah, yeah. And you don't hear from most of them. Yeah, there's just a few that get back to you. I'm often, like, trying to figure out how to get people to interact over and over again. I tell people, you know, just go to the website, and there's a little button there you can click on, and then you can leave me a voicemail, and that's so nice to hear your voice, and, but very few people ever take that step to go.
So, what is the major piece of interaction that you get with your listeners?
Mostly? It used to be on Twitter…
Yeah.
…yeah. I had a really, you know, vibrant Twitter experience that every time I put an episode out, I'd promote it on Twitter, and I'd have lots of people come back to me and like, oh, great, I'm going to listen to this or sometimes I listened, and this was inspiring or whatever.
I don't have so much of that anymore. Well, part of it is that I haven't been podcasting for a while, but even the experience with Twitter has changed so much, not just the name. A lot of people seem to have fled, and that's not so great. So now there's several social platforms I use.
I'm still not a Facebooker or an Instagram person but, I do Mastodon. I have a Mastodon site, and I do Blue Sky. Those are not nearly as rich in interaction as I used to. My favorites are usually, an email. Sometimes people can send me really deep thoughts in email, and I've had back and forth with people through email, and I welcome those all the time.
Yeah, I find email is the best, too, because, like you said, there is that deep thought instead of a certain amount of characters or they're just typing on their phones and then they hit send. This is a genuine interaction where you want to dive deeper into that episode with you. And that's so great to hear that that was happening with you and your show.
A couple others is, meeting people in real life…
Yeah,
…that's happened. A couple of times I've met fans and patrons of the podcast have gotten in touch with me, and I find out where they're from and when I'm in their city, go out and meet them and have dinner or whatever that's happened. I've had one person I met on Twitter and became a real big booster of the podcast, and eventually I had him on the podcast…
Oh, cool!
…I've had a couple of people like that, because you can tell the people who really love it, usually you have common interest with them. Often they're the kind of people you might want to talk to for an hour, and it might be an interesting conversation that other people want to hear.
Yeah. Oh, you clearly have a passion for this, so I'm excited to hear if you're going to be, in the future, producing new episodes again. But that's in the future. What about right now, as we close off this conversation, what excites you the most about podcasting right now?
Well, I'm very excited about AI. I'm both excited and disappointed. [LAUGHTER] When ChatGPT erupted about a year ago, um, I was just obsessed at first, and I thought it was like the coolest thing on the planet. And then it disappointed me. They started putting more and more guardrails in, and it got more and more bland and like, what is this? It's not really that useful.
And sometimes it seems like it's only good for summaries and things like that, but it's also getting more interesting in other ways now with all the multimodal kind of stuff, like the latest from OpenAI, the ChatGPT 4.0 for Omni. There's demos of it being very multimodal, where it can see your environment and process it in real time, and you can have a conversation with it. There's video and audio involved, and you can actually, it can become like a real person almost.
This is like our sci-fi dreams coming true.
Yeah, yeah. It's kind of like Her getting towards the movie Her, but without the deep romantic involvement, hopefully. Yeah, yeah.
But I think that could be a really interesting thing for podcasts, because, you know, if you have a lot of content and somebody wants to query it, you know, get involved and interact with it, it would be really nice if they could just like, start a conversation and ask questions and have like a real interaction, like kind of a substitute for me being, you know, a person who doesn't have the time to talk to anybody, any time about what's on the podcast, you know, somebody who just is always there and available to talk about it. And I think a lot of podcasts would really benefit from that kind of interaction, especially the ones that have a lot of content.
I had two thoughts on that. One was like, but I want to talk to those people. I don't want a robot talking to them. But also, at the same time, I was like, huh, that could work for like, time zone difference. I gotta sleep, too. I am a human, I have a body, and I need to rest so, ugh.
I think one of the words that's key here is agent. If that robot was like an agent for you, where they knew your schedule, they knew how to get people in touch with you and how you wanted to interact with people directly it could facilitate that kind of thing, I think that's where we're heading is that these things are going to become kind of personal agents that will do a lot of things that just a rich and vibrant social interaction, you know, life with everyone without going crazy, because they'll offload a lot of the work and handle all of that for you.
I like that. So they're not here to take over the world…
[LAUGHTER]
Right. Hopefully not.
…hopefully not.
Yes.
Joel, it's been a pleasure. Thank you so much for coming on the show and sharing your insights with us.
[MUSIC IN]
All right, well, thank you. It's been a wonderful experience for me.
That was really neat to hear his perspective on podcasting, as his is more of a hobby podcast. Namely, his podcasts are sci-fi based and more of a narrative style as well, versus a podcast to market your business with. Yet there are still similar things that you can learn from a different focus or niche podcast for your own show. And then you combine that with his accessibility background, his podcast becomes a great learning model for exploring what is possible. And it still all comes down to the listener. You know, his podcast might be very different from your podcast, it's very different from my podcast. But the similarity here is your listener, your listener's needs and wants. It's not about you, it's not about yourself, it's not about the podcast creator.
So there are a few takeaways from his experience. And like he mentioned at the end, ChatGPT, it is great for summarizing. So he said he even did that before our conversation. He told it his ideas and themes that he wanted to talk about, and then it summarized it, and then he sent that to me. And when I got it, you know what? It wasn't half bad, and I was able to point to the items that I wanted to dive deeper into our conversation. So there is use for that and for us to then distill what we wanted to talk about in this episode. And so it is the best use at this point in time, like he said, and there really is a lot of growth here, and I don't think it's gonna go anywhere. So in some ways, we do need to embrace this.
And hopefully, like him and his optimistic approach to AI, that it's not gonna be the scary version of those robots taking over the world or better yet, I want a more human approach, I guess. Not that I am pessimistic about AI, but I want that human piece to remain at the forefront of our connections in work and life. And our example of using ChatGPT to summarize points and thoughts, and then we actually went back and forth over email to finesse it a bit more. So I like that human piece to it.
And remember, like he said in the episode, it's always nice to hear from listeners. So we both encourage you to leave some feedback. If you listen to his show, go leave him some feedback there.
Or for myself, you can leave a voice note from my website. You look for the purple button that says send voicemail or email works really well too. We can maybe deep dive into more of this accessibility and AI stuff. So send me an email [email protected]. let me know if you have the same optimistic outlook as Joel does.
On the next episode. We are going back to the human side of things. Enough talk about AI I guess. We're going to talk more about listening. And this is something that isn't machine learned. Not machine learned listening, but the human side of listening for what you're saying and how you're saying it. The emotional peace in listening that will make you a better podcaster. We'll chat with you then.
[MUSIC ENDS / OUTRO MUSIC IN]
<< GHOSTHOOD FEATURING SARA AZRIEL “LET’S GO” BEGINS >> Thank you so much for listening to the podcaster's guide to a Visible Voice. If you enjoyed this episode, I'd love it if you'd share it with a podcasting friend. And to reveal more voicing and podcasting tips, click on over to VisibleVoicePodcast.com. Until next time. << WOMAN SINGS: Let’s go >>
[MUSIC ENDS]