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&r