Accessible and ‘a pleasure to read’: how Apple’s podcast transcriptions came to be

Apple rolled out a feature highly requested by both disabled users and podcast creators. Why did it take so long?

Ren Shelburne was fed up with trying to listen to popular podcast episodes her friends recommended. Shelburne, a photographer with partial hearing loss and an auditory processing condition, remembers struggling to finish a particular episode. It was a specific type of show: too many talking heads, complicated overlapping dialogue and, until recently, no transcription. “Those I’m just so lost on because there’s just too much going on at once,” Shelburne says. She couldn’t follow along, so she couldn’t discuss the show with her friends. “Podcasts are such a big part of pop culture and media at this point. I want to be able to be a part of that conversation.”

Weekly podcast listenership in the United States has more than quadrupled in the past decade, according to Pew Research. For some, though, the medium still feels inaccessible.

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