There are a variety of podcast hosting services. Some are more popular than others. But very few appear to be accessible - both in terms of pushing accessible podcasts and podcast pages, but also in terms of being used by disabled podcasters. I’m looking for help making a list of the pros and cons of each ones, when it comes to accessibility.
Podcasting services
Here is a non-exhaustive list of podcast hosting services I would like to start with. If you use and/or know one that isn’t in this list, by all means, add it and start doing an assessment!
And if anyone from these services wants to provide a self-assessment, please, do so! I welcome all information about these services.
What to check
What makes a podcast accessible? Well, as you may garner from the entirety of the site, several things. Here are some basic items for a quick check:
- Are there transcripts available?
- For every show?
- Where are they located? On the same page? On a separate page? As a download? Etc.
- Is the media player keyboard accessible?
- Can you get to the player by using the tab key on your keyboard?
- Can you reach and activate every interactive element in the player with only the keyboard?
- Can you see where the focus is on the player when tabbing through with a keyboard?
- Media player screen reader accessibility?
- I’ll check that myself, unless you’re familiar with screen readers, at which point do check and let me know!
- Is the website accessible?
- This one, I’m not asking you to check. I’ll do a review of the services that come back to me before publishing.
How to provide this information
Please put the information on the GitHub page, send a pull request.
View the list of podcast hosting and add accessibility information
If you do not have a GitHub account or are intimidated by GitHub, please send me a tweet to organize a different way to provide me the information.
Formatting the information
Please do make sure to itemize each point listed above with a “yes/no/maybe” and provide notes if and when appropriate. Don’t worry too much about the formatting. I’ll clean that up.