[Accessible] Content is King

In 1996, Bill Gates used the phrase 'Content is King' in an essay he wrote for Microsoft. I'm not sure even Bill Gates could have predicted the reality that we are living in today. The amount of time people spend online has exploded in recent years, particularly during the pandemic. Everything from buying a house to seeing your doctor can be done with a decent laptop and good internet.

The sheer amount of content online that is competing for your attention is staggering. So, how do you make your content stand out? How do you ensure that you are reaching the widest audience?

Here's something that every Digital Accessibility Producer knows: making your content accessible has benefits far beyond legislative compliance and good PR.

Video content: Video is the vehicle of choice for many content creators. A well done, well edited video with a strong message is what producers strive for. But what if you are excluding people from interacting with that message? Including proper captions on your video is not just a helpful addition for folks with hearing loss, those same captions also significantly increase viewer engagement. Now that we can watch almost anything on our phones, we want to watch content anywhere we are - including places where we don't want the sound turned up. Therefore - almost all of us stay longer on content that is captioned. I know I tend to scroll past content that is not captioned.

The reliance on captions has also extended to my home viewing - and I cant tell you the number of friends who tell me they watch everything with captions.

Podcasts: The podcasting industry in Canada has seen an explosion in growth in recent years. According to ThePodcastExchange.ca, approximately 30% of Canadians enjoy podcasts on a monthly basis. More importantly for content producers, the bulk of those listeners are in the highly coveted 18-34 age demographic. Better still, those listening to podcasts tend to be highly educated and affluent. Podcast producers need to understand that by not providing a text transcript for their podcasts, they are ignoring a pretty valuable pool of consumers.

ADDED BONUS: Text is searchable, audio is not! If someone is looking for a subject or title or person what do they do? Hello search engine! Those search engines only look for text based references to get results. No transcript - no search results.

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