This week I’ll be travelling to Toronto to attend and present at the ICA 2023 Preconference 20 Years of Podcasting: Mapping the Contours of Podcast Studies. I’m very much looking forward to this as it’s the first in-person conference I’ll have been at in years.
At the conference, I’ll be talking about a special episode of 9plus, which we attempted to make as accessible as possible for a Deaf or Hard-of-Hearing (DHH) audience. This came from a conversation with SETU researcher Una Kealy and Kate McCarthy, who really initiated the push towards accessibility.
The subject of this podcast episode was their project Lyrical Bodies, which is all to do with Waterford playwright and author Teresa Deevy. Important point – Deevy was deaf. The project includes a collaboration with the Dublin Theatre of the Deaf and Una and Kate wanted to ensure any materials produced as part of the project would be accessible to their stakeholders. The podcast involved a conversation between me, Una, Kate and another project partner Jenny O’Connor [full disclosure – Jenny and I are married]
I would love to say that this arose from some sort of altruistic intention on my part to adhere to UDL guidelines with the podcast, but the attempt came from a suggestion by Una and Kate. I’ll be 100% honest – DHH accessibility was not something I had considered before this, much to my own shame. I researched the subject as best I could and fudged together an attempt at making the podcast more inclusive.
At the conference next week, I’ll be talking about what we did and how we did it. I will refer to a number of artefacts that are linked here:
The regular audio version of the podcast is available on all the usual podcast platforms. Here’s a podfollow link to the specific episode.
A text transcription of the conversation is available here
Finally, there are two video versions of the podcast (both hosted on YouTube). The first contains a video with captions:
The second version is a video of the podcast with Irish Sign Language (ISL) translation, provided by Caoimhe Coburn-Grey:
I plan on recording a version of the presentation after the event (being selfish – it’s so I don’t forget what I said!) If you’re interested in some of the background research, I’ll have a full bibliography in the presentation, but I recommend reading these to get going:
