Welcome to the thirty-fourth episode of Access On, the National Federation of the Blind's Technology podcast.
Episode
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Timestamps
- Back from national convention 0:00
- More on podcasting as a blind person 1:52
- Closing and contact info 56:34
Transcript
Speaker 1:
Live the life you want.
Speaker 2:
Access On.
Jonathan Mosen:
Welcome to Access On, the technology podcast of the National Federation of the Blind. This week we continue with highlights of our webinar on how to do podcasting as a blind person.
It's Jonathan Mosen welcoming you to episode 34 of the podcast, not from The Jernigan Institute in Baltimore, Maryland today, but actually from my own home studio in Baltimore, Maryland. I'm grateful for that. It's good to have one again. And I'm recording it from home because I have literally just got through the door having returned from New Orleans and our amazing National Federation of the Blind National Convention for 2025.
It was great to run into so many of you, sometimes actually literally. That's all right. And hear how much you're enjoying Access On and some of the other CENA activities that we're involved in here at the National Federation of the Blind. So that's wonderful and we have lots of things that we've brought back from National Convention that will keep us busy with Access
On for some episodes to come, including a recording of an Access In episode that we did live at convention. We will prioritize that and get to that once we get through our podcasting webinar.
And as you can appreciate, it has been a busy week and that's what we are going to occupy this episode with. We've had lots of demand for this, so we're going to continue with it, more on our series that was presented in a four hour webinar back in June, on June the 11th, to be precise, all about how to podcast as a blind person.
We've taken a look at hardware. We are moving on to software this week as we move through this archive. And I'm going to segue into this by talking about two different categories of Digital Audio Workstation or DAW for short. Some people pronounce it D-A-W, so take your pick. You're going to be spending a lot of time in the package that you choose because it's the key piece of software for recording, producing and editing your podcast.
There are two broad categories of Digital Audio Workstation, those that are single track and those that are multitrack. Single track environments are probably easier to use. Multitrack environments though are far more powerful and give you greater flexibility. Single track DAWs record and edit all audio elements onto that one track. This limits the ability to adjust individual elements separately during editing.
So let me give you an example. Let's say that you're recording your podcast and you have a theme tune that starts that podcast and you talk over that theme. You can paste in the audio file containing the theme tune and then you can record yourself talking over the top of that theme, but later you decide that the music is a bit too loud and it's drowning out your talking.
By that stage, the only option you have with a single track DAW is to do the whole thing again because you've got to paste in the theme at a slightly lower level. You can't make adjustments to the balance between those elements when you're editing on a single track.
Or let's say that you are interviewing someone, and I've had this, every time you ask a question, they take the opportunity to cough, sniff, clear their throat and generally make very distracting noise.
If you are recording on a single track, there's nothing you can do about that other perhaps than recording over the interview later and asking your questions all over again and that's time consuming. So people often use single track recording for simple projects or live performances that require minimal post-production.
If you're going to do a podcast with no music and no interviews, just you talking into a mic, then a single track DAW may be a good option for you. In contrast, multitrack DAWs allow users to record and edit multiple audio tracks independently. This is the modern version of Melissa's two tape recorders.
You can place each aspect of your production on its own track if you're interviewing guests and using a good remote recording tool or you are giving your in-person guests a microphone each. Each guest can have their own track.
If you're doing a demo involving a screen reader, you can be on one track and your screen reader can be on another. You can put musical elements or sound effects on their own track so you can adjust the balance when you are editing it later. You can apply effects and equalization to each track separately.
So if your remote guest sounds very different from you because of the microphone they're using, then you can use equalization and other plugins to try and make things sound more even. If someone coughs or generally makes noises you don't want to hear, you can edit their track without affecting the rest of the recording.
You can also more freely experiment. You can make some adjustments to one track and if you don't like them, you can change it back.
All good DAWs have an undo feature. If you're happy to stay with a single track recording environment and the only kind of thing that you're doing is recording spoken word material, like podcasts, then my recommendation on Windows would be Studio Recorder. Studio Recorder is designed specifically for spoken word recording and it was developed by APH, and the primary use case is the recording of talking books.
It's fully accessible and it does have some handy tools like an accessible level meter. This is a good time for me to discuss setting your levels if you don't have an audio interface that helps you with that process. You want to make sure when you're recording that you're not sending too much audio to your recorder, but be it a hardware recorder like a Zoom H4essential or a Digital Audio Workstation.
It is very hard to get distortion out of a recording once it's in. You can always amplify it a little bit, but there are risks in amplifying it too much because if you're bringing the volume up artificially too much, you will also introduce some hiss. So it is a good idea to record just a little under and then bring the label up just a fraction by amplification, all through a process called normalization, which makes the loudest point of a file a volume that you specify.
Now Studio Recorder is very good because it will beep at you by default when your levels start to peak, so you have an audible level meter right there warning you when you're sending too much audio to Studio Recorder. It's spoken word focused and therefore it offers features that are hard to find in other applications like the ability to navigate by sentence and paragraph.
There is a set of preferences that you can configure, which when done according to your mic proximity and the way that you breathe will allow you to navigate reliably most of the time between sentences and paragraphs.
The assumption being you pause at the end of a sentence and you pause a little longer at the end of a paragraph. It has excellent means of speeding up the recording as you edit without speeding up the pitch, but it's not cheap. A copy of Studio Recorder for digital download will set you back 200 dollars.
Now we've already talked about GoldWave, it's a much loved product in the blind community for good reason. Goldwave is a single track editor that's very popular. The developer is aware of screen reader users and tries to keep the app accessible. In fact, the user guide even contains a section on using the application with screen readers, which is just great.
It has more bells and whistles than Studio Recorder, including noise reduction and effects, a yearly license costs only 20 dollars, while a lifetime license is 60 dollars. And because it's so widely used in the blind community, there are plenty of blind people who'll be able to help you with it and there are audio tutorials available for GoldWave as well.
Now let's talk about multitrack solutions, which unless your needs are very simple, I suggest is the best way to go when podcasting. Yes, it's going to be a little bit more complex to learn, but help is on the way and it's going to be worth investing your time because I think there is a real risk that you will outgrow a single track recorder and then you have to start all over again with the learning anyway.
If price is the number one consideration, and I saw reference to this in the chat, there is a free Digital Audio Workstation available and it is maintained regularly and it's open source, and its name is Audacity. And it's cross platform. So there's a version of Audacity for Mac OS and Windows and some Linux based operating systems too.
There is a wiki page on the Audacity Wiki website that gives you a lot of information about how blind people can work with Audacity and there's also an email list for blind users of Audacity.
My perception is that REAPER is a bit more polished and it does have a much larger blind user base. There is an overview and demonstration of Audacity in The Blind Podmaker feed as well, if you'd like to find out how it works. Melissa's talked about this, and like many blind people who do audio production, I am a huge fan of the Digital Audio Workstation called REAPER.
It is affordable, it's powerful and so accessible when you have all the right tools installed. It's almost as if it was written for blind people. It is available both on Windows and Mac. REAPER has an application programming interface, an API, and there is an actively maintained bridge between REAPER and screen readers and it's called OSARA.
A discounted REAPER license costs you 60 bucks, and I'm pretty confident that most people here will qualify for that discount, if not everybody here. That gives you access to the current version and all versions up until the next major one finishes.
So because REAPER is currently at 7.x, buying a license now will give you free upgrades until version 8.99, so it's quite reasonable. OSARA, the bridge between REAPER and screen readers is free. It is screen reader agnostic. It works with JAWS, NVDA and it also works with VoiceOver on the Mac.
REAPER is so powerful that it can feel overwhelming. But as we've mentioned, there is a large and active enthusiastic community of blind REAPER users to support you. You can attend regular webinars specifically for the blind community. There is that active email list that Melissa mentioned called REAPERs Without Peepers, and there are plenty of audio tutorials available.
A good starting point, just to reiterate, if you want to learn more about REAPER, download OSARA, all the tools you need is reaperaccessibility.com and that will also link you to some of the other free audio training resources. Brian Hartgen's REAPER tutorial can also be found at hartgenconsultancy.com.
When REAPER and OSARA are working together, you have accessible level meters, you can speed up the audio without speeding up the pitch, and there is remarkable power and flexibility. You can even edit video files with REAPER, which some people who work with YouTube will be pleased to hear.
We've talked about using your iDevice as a field recorder and there is no shortage of really good field recorder apps. The VoiceMemos app, which is built into every iPhone, and that is a powerful little voice recorder, that's a good option.
In terms of third-party apps, there's Audio Memos, Just Press Record, which is great because it's cross-device, there's a Just Press Record on your Apple Watch, there's a Just Press Record for your iPhone and iPad and also on the Mac.
The most accessible full Digital Audio Workstation for iOS that I have found is called Ferrite. F-E-R-R-I-T-E. Ferrite is one of those glorious apps that has something quite rare in the iOS world, a comprehensive user guide. You can purchase the basic version of Ferrite, but you can make in-app purchases to unlock a whole lot of features, including adding effects like reverb and dynamic audio processing. You can do complex editing.
There's even one that reduces gaps in sound, which could be useful if you're recording an online meeting where there's a bit of latency. There is a stack of keyboard commands available in Ferrite as well. You can make selections with the touchscreen or you can use the keyboard. Recording is easy. It will upload the results to Dropbox and a number of other cloud-based services.
And while Ferrite is accessible, in my view it's nowhere near as efficient for fine editing as REAPER or Studio Recorder or in fact any PC tool. So if you are going to do full editing with Ferrite, as a voiceover user, it is going to take you longer.
Before you record your first podcast episode, get yourself a good chunk of cloud storage from a service like Google Drive, Dropbox, OneDrive, iCloud, and similar. The reason why you want to do this is if you're working on a major project and your computer experiences some sort of hard drive failure, it can be devastating to have lost that wonderful interview that you've recorded but not yet published.
If you have Microsoft 365, it comes with a terabyte of OneDrive storage as part of your subscription. When it comes to audio, you want it to be as good as you can make it when you record. Now, there are tools that can try and boost or recover audio, but they have mixed success. So the garbage in, garbage out principle applies here.
Broadly speaking, there are two kinds of audio formats out there, lossless formats and lossy formats. When I talked about hard drive space, I mentioned that one minute of CD quality audio consumes 10 megabytes of storage. So how is it then that when you get a song that lasts for say four minutes from your favorite music service, it only occupies between four or 12 megabytes of disk space?
Well, the reason why the file is so much smaller is that it has been saved in what we call a lossy compression format. An MP3 or M4A file is not a faithful reproduction of the original recording. To save space, the audio is squished up or compressed. The algorithm eliminates sound that most human ears don't consider important to make the file smaller. We'll look at your options for publishing your podcast a bit later.
But when you're making your podcast, you want to, whenever possible, use a lossless format. The reason for this is that the more times you encode a lossy audio format, the more artifacts you're going to introduce. If you use a lossless format, then you can open and save as many times as you like, introducing no artifacts.
The two most common lossless formats are the WAV format in Windows with a WAV extension and the AIFF format on the Mac. Unfortunately, simply advising you to record in those formats doesn't give you the full picture that you need. You do have a lot of choice over the kind of file that you create and therefore how much space it's going to take up.
There are two parameters you need to concern yourself with. The first is the sample rate because when you record onto a digital device of any kind, you are taking multiple samples of the audio every second and they're stored as zeros and ones on your digital device. So the sampling rate determines how many samples per second your recording's going to capture.
The more samples it captures, the better the frequency response. In other words, how full and rich at the low and high end will the audio sound? The larger the file is going to be, by the way, the more samples that it takes. CDs take 44,100 samples every second.
But these days generally accepted good practice is to go better than CD quality even for spoken word and record ar a sampling rate of 48 kilohertz, 48,000 basically per second.
Next, you need to decide on a bit depth. The bit depth determines how many bits each sample consists of. The higher the bit depth, the more dynamic range your recording is going to have. CDs use a bit depth of 16. For slightly wider and more natural dynamic range, many people now recommend to go to 24 bits for podcast recording.
You can also choose whether to record in mono or stereo, and when you record in stereo, you are making two channels of audio at a time, a left channel and a right channel. So when you record in mono, you're only making one and that means that a mono file is going to be half the size of a stereo file.
Mono may be adequate if you are using no musical elements or you don't want to pan your participants to sound like they're in different positions in the stereo spectrum.
So far we've talked about lossy audio formats that are compressed and lossless audio formats that are uncompressed and just to complicate things, there are actually compressed audio formats which are lossless and these formats shrink the audio without causing any loss of quality whatsoever and therefore artifacts shrinkage is not nearly as great as an MP3 or an M4A file, but it is significant enough that it can save you many gigabytes of disk space across a project.
Traditionally, people with good speaker setups who care about the quality of their audio convert their music connections if they were in CD from way back to FLAC, free lossless audio codec, or some other lossless format, which will give them a faithful reproduction of the CD with no loss at all.
And it's also used by audio creators who want to keep lossless copies of their work without consuming masses of disk space. And the good news is REAPER will work with FLAC files as part of the audio creation process so you can create FLAC files of better than CD quality, save them in FLAC as you work and have them take up far less disk space than WAV files without any compromise in quality.
There are many ways to begin a podcast episode and there's no one right way to start one. In fact, the way that you begin your episode could be a real trademark for your podcast. Now, I'm a radio guy, so I tend to treat my podcast like radio shows, but not everybody does that and that makes podcasting eclectic.
I doubt that people will stop listening to your podcast just because it doesn't have a fancy intro. You can do some or all of the work of preparing an intro yourself or you can throw money at the problem and get someone else to do it for you. There are many people who will voice podcast elements for you and they will charge based on how much you want them to do, how in demand they are, whether they are a big name voice or not.
Just type podcast voiceover into your favorite search engine and you'll find all kinds of options coming up, allowing you to audition a wide range of voices and find one that you think will work for your podcast.
Broadly speaking, voiceover work will fall into two categories. The first is that you provide a script and the voice talent sits down and reads that script verbatim. They'll often give you two or three takes to choose from, and then they will send back the raw audio with nothing but their voice. You can then put music behind it.
You can add additional compression yourself if you want. You can add effects, maybe a bit of reverb or whatever you think works. Alternatively, the talent can send you back a complete finished product and that'll cost a lot more because it takes more work.
And we now live in an AI age and on sites like ElevenLabs, you can provide a script and you can then audition a range of voices to read it. Sometimes working with AI can take a while as you try to get the emphasis and the pauses exactly the way that you want them. Now, there is a hybrid approach too, and I use this on Living Blindfully.
I went to a voice talent and I asked for permission to make a copy of his voice in ElevenLabs. He gave his consent, which meant that all I had to do was type my script into ElevenLabs and I had him voicing any sort of voiceover that I needed. But please make sure that you have written consent before you embark on that approach.
If you want to work with a raw voice file and turn it into a finished product yourself, you need to make your own music, have someone make the music that's original for you, or find some royalty free music.
There are plenty of great blind musicians who would do an outstanding job of creating something unique for you. Alternatively, search for royalty free music beds. There are several ways that you can access these sorts of beds.
Some sites allow you to browse online and listen to samples and just purchase the individual music beds that you'd like to use. And others let you purchase entire music libraries for download. And if you're going to be doing a lot of audio production, it can be handy to have a full library on your hard drive that you can browse quickly.
No matter how you choose to begin your podcast, it's a good idea early in the piece to tell people what your podcast is going to be covering. True, your episode title and your show notes should also make this clear.
But some people will have your podcast as part of a playlist, so they may not have seen the show notes. It's up to you to make a compelling pitch that convinces someone that this episode is worthy of their very precious time.
So let's contrast these two approaches to the same episode. Approach number one, in this week's episode, I'm going to be talking with Fred Frisbee who said he and his daughter experienced discrimination while on a flight from Baltimore to Los Angeles.
Or approach number two, Fred Frisbee saved up to take his daughter Frieda on the trip of a lifetime to Disneyland. Their trip got off to the roughest of starts when on the flight to Los Angeles, the airline undermined his parental authority just because he was blind.
So which of those intros do you think would encourage more people to stay listening? I'd suggest the second because it teases you with a story, it hooks you in.
So here's another example, approach number one, this week's episode looks at meditation and how taking a few minutes out of your busy life can improve your stress levels. Approach number two, the emails are pouring in and the phone won't stop ringing, but our next guest says that if you make yourself do nothing for just 20 minutes a day, you'll get more done and feel better doing it.
Stay with us as we look at the miracle of meditation. And a final example, approach number one, today I'm going to be demonstrating the exciting new Seeing AI app available for free from Microsoft.
Or approach number two, one free app reads your mail and computer screens, instantly scans documents, identifies barcodes and even recognizes people. We learn about the differences Seeing AI app can make to your life.
If you're using a braille display, you might like to have your script on your smartphone or on a display itself if it loads documents on its own, and that allows you to stay in your Digital Audio Workstation software window and drop in if you make a mistake, if your DAW supports that. And that can speed your audio production up a lot.
For a demonstration of dropping in, once again, check out The Blind Podmaker feed, but the idea is that if you know that you've made a mistake, rather than just keeping going and editing it later, you can stop the recording, play it back and press record just after the final sentence before the mistake so that you can just keep on going.
If you're recording a tech demo using your computer or any device with a screen reader, I want to offer a few tips. Record using a text to speech engine that's easy to understand for everybody at a sensible speed.
You may be able to understand it at a zillion words a minute, but it's not about you, it's about your listeners. If you're in any doubt, slow it down. Second, be respectful of your audience's time. Most people listen to a podcast which has a tech demo to find out how to use an app or the product that you're demonstrating.
I think there is an expectation that you are going to teach them something. There is a unique scenario where you may be unboxing a new device or installing new software and you make it clear that you're recording how you are unboxing and familiarizing yourself with that new thing, that is a legitimate genre of technology demonstration.
Just be really clear that that's what you're doing. Otherwise, I think there will be an assumption that you are teaching someone how to use a piece of technology.
If it's a demo and you find that you don't know what a feature does or how to use that feature, either leave the feature out or do your research. Pause the recording until you figure out what it is and how to use it. It makes you sound far more credible. Third, don't repeat everything that your text to speech engine says. I feel really bad about this because I think I may have started this practice back in the '90s.
It was a long time ago when speech synthesizers weren't as clear as they are now. That is no longer necessary and it wastes a lot of time. Fourth, don't talk while the screen reader is talking. It's difficult to hear two voices talking at once.
Let's discuss software to get other people on your podcast via the internet. Being able to bring a guest in from anywhere in the world opens up so many possibilities. You may have several tools in your toolbox and the tool you elect to use may depend on the technological literacy of your guest.
You might want to interview someone who doesn't have a smartphone or a computer or who really struggles with them. In that case, a good old phone call might be the best option. There are tools allowing you to record phone calls from your computer, but many smartphones including iPhone now finally will record as well on iPhone.
You can press the record button when you're on a phone or FaceTime call. If you're an iPhone user and you are interviewing someone who is also an iPhone user, going with a FaceTime call, FaceTime audio will give you much better quality than a standard phone call.
A voice tells the caller that they are being recorded and then the recording is stored in the iPhone's notes app. But there's one caveat at the time of recording. There is currently a bug in iOS 18 which will prevent you from exporting long recordings.
I'm not clear what the threshold is, but until we hear that this one has been fixed, hopefully in iOS 26, you may want to steer clear of it for podcast recordings, which tend to be on the longer side. You may use a standard conferencing tool like Zoom, Teams, Google Meet or Webex, tools that we've covered recently.
With several of these tools, it is possible for people to dial in and enter a code, so they can be viable ways to record telephone participants as well. Most people are familiar with Zoom and all of these tools have web interfaces, so a guest doesn't necessarily have to install anything.
If you record locally, Zoom will create separate files for every speaker if you've got it set up to do that, and that's ideal for multitrack environments. Unfortunately, the files that Zoom creates are lossy and at a fairly low bit rate. They are very compressed M4A files.
And these tools are conferencing tools first and foremost, so they employ features like noise reduction and some compression. There are ways to override a lot of these features, but most people don't know how and don't have that enabled in settings.
So typically I can always tell when someone's using a tool like Zoom or Teams on their podcast.
The good thing about all these tools is that they work over the internet. The bad thing about all these tools is that they work over the internet. Not everybody has reliable fast internet access. Hopefully you do because if you don't, it's going to make recording these sorts of podcasts difficult.
So I'm assuming that you do and that is your guest who may not always have reliable fast internet access. If they don't, a couple of things could happen. The first is that some of these voiceover internet protocol applications are sensitive to this and they will lower the bandwidth being used, which lessens the audio quality.
But that also means the audio will sound worse. The second thing that can happen is that there's buffering and skipping because the audio stops and starts due to a lack of bandwidth or some sort of bottleneck somewhere.
One way of getting around this problem of talking to people over the internet is to do the talking over the internet, but get your guest or your co-host to record the audio at their end and then send you the recording.
So you record your own audio but not the audio of your co-host or your guest, and now when you get the audio file from your guest or your co-host, you use your DAW software to fuse it all together and you've got the best quality recording possible with the equipment that is in use, since there was no voiceover internet involved at all.
In podcasting jargon, this is known as a double-ender. The trouble with this very good approach from an audio file perspective is that it also requires a lot of technical ability. Somebody's got to have DAW software on their computer.
I mean everybody has because even the windows has the Windows recorder, but they've got to be comfortable using it, which is the big caveat, and you can hardly expect some busy non techie person who's doing you a favor to do this sort of trick.
This is why there are several tools that try to automate this process. You go to a website which connects to your guests over the internet so you can hear each other, but when you record, behind the scenes the website is making local recordings of each guest.
When you're done, it uploads everyone's audio and you download it as a package. It's interesting to note that in MacOS 26 Tahoe, this sort of thing will be available later in the year and it's built into the operating system. There are several sites like this and accessibility will vary widely.
Also, every single site like this that I'm aware of doesn't get it right 100% of the time. If you scan podcasting forums, and I really find it very valuable to take a look at the r/podcasting forum on Reddit, you will find stories of all of them messing up important podcast episodes.
They do work most of the time, but when they don't work, it can be a heartbreaker. Some of them are frequently prone to drifting, so tracks get more and more out of sync over time.
For audio podcasts, there is a tool that minimizes the risks of these podcast sites that record locally and it produces beautiful quality audio. I started working with them some years ago now and they have taken an active interest in accessibility, improving their accessibility over time and always taking it into account when adding new features, and this is called Cleanfeed, all one word.
You can find it at cleanfeed.net. Cleanfeed offers several advantages over other podcast recording options, particularly in terms of audio quality, ease of use and reliability. You can learn a lot about Cleanfeed in The Blind Podmaker feed and I highly encourage you to become familiar with what it has to offer. But here is a summary.
Cleanfeed is designed by audio engineers and it's built to deliver studio quality audio with high quality faithful reproduction of the signals that it gets and even stereo sound if you want that. It was used a lot by radio stations during the pandemic so broadcasters could broadcast from home actually.
Cleanfeed operates directly through a web browser and that eliminates the need for software installations, and this browser-based approach ensures compatibility across various operating systems including Mac, Windows, Linux, and Android. Only the host needs a Cleanfeed account.
Guests can join sessions via a simple link, and that streamlines the process for all participants. It establishes peer-to-peer connections as well, so that reduces reliance on central servers and enhances reliability during recordings.
As the host, you also have some control over the audio of your participants because it can be really frustrating if someone's a bit quiet and you can't get them to turn themselves up because they don't know how. So you can take care of that in Cleanfeed. You can use Cleanfeed free and if you record through Cleanfeed, you get everyone, including yourself, on a single track.
If you're just working with one remote guest, you could always record from Cleanfeed using REAPER, which is a good reason to go for an audio interface offering loopback capability because then you can have yourself on one track and your Cleanfeed guest on another. If you're using identical microphones, it will sound like you're in the same studio.
But there's also a service called Cleanfeed Pro. And among other features, it offers multitrack recording, capturing each participant's audio on separate tracks. For example, a couple of days ago we produced an episode of Access On covering Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference Keynote and there were four of us on that episode and I recorded the whole thing in Cleanfeed. REAPER was not involved in that recording at all.
When the recording session was over, I had five separate tracks that I could send to Orphonic, which is a service that I will discuss shortly. One track per speaker and a fifth track containing the opening and closing theme, and that meant that I was able to record and do podcast production entirely from my web browser. I could even have done this podcast on something like a Chromebook, and that's impressive.
Cleanfeed includes studio tools, like virtual carts for playing jingles, theme music or other sounds. Cleanfeed is an impressive tool and I use it whenever I can, and I only use anything else if using Cleanfeed may cause anxiety or difficulty for a guest.
If you are hosting a podcast where you're looking for interviews, let's talk about how to find people worth interviewing and how to approach them. If your podcast is specific and you're an expert in your field, chances are you have good networks, good connections in the field, and you read a lot on the subject already.
Books, word of mouth, newspaper articles and blogs are all good sources for potential interview subjects. If your podcast has a current affairs emphasis on a specific subject area, one way to keep up with it is by using Google News. Long ago I set up a Google News feed with a convoluted series of phrases that gives me news stories on blindness related issues.
You can receive alerts via email or you can subscribe to it in an RSS reader. Every day I scan that feed for interesting stories. If I find one that captures my attention, I then have to go researching to find the individual.
It can be helpful to use social media such as Facebook or LinkedIn. For people who are particularly hard to find such as senior executives, I found the deep research feature in ChatGPT increasingly useful. It's important to make a professional approach.
If your grammar is poor and your spelling is atrocious, you're going to be taken less seriously. For Access On, the National Federation of the Blind's technology podcast, I have an intro which I store in Leasey, which is an add-on for JAWS that I use. Sometimes I modify it, but usually it's adequate as it is.
So here's the text that I send potential interview subjects. "Hello, my name is Jonathan Mosen and I'm the host of Access On, the technology podcast of the National Federation of the Blind. Access On is heard widely by blind people as well as others interested in access technology. You can find Access On in all major podcast apps and repositories.
We also make high quality human generated transcripts available, making our podcast one of the few fully accessible to deafblind people, and making our content easily searchable. I'm reaching out because..." And then I write something specific about why I'm approaching the potential guest.
I also use a scheduling tool to try and speed things up, so rather than sending emails back and forth about when we can all get together, I provide a link where they can see free slots on my calendar and book one. I use Fantastical for this myself, but Calendly is also very popular, and there are others.
Some inexperienced interviewees will be nervous, so it's important to reassure them from the beginning that the podcast is pre-recorded, that you will edit the interview and respect any request the person makes to start an answer again.
On the other hand, some potential interviewees, including very experienced people who are just trying to push their luck, want a list of questions in advance. If my interviewee insists on this, I cancel the interview.
Inevitably, answers that are done this way sound way too rehearsed and they're often read from a script. But you can give a brief overview, a roadmap of the subject matter that you want to cover.
When you get that big interview, do your research. If it's appropriate, ask your guest if they have a bio document that they can send you. A lot of people who do public speaking have this. LinkedIn pages can be a rich source of biographical information.
You can use AI for this as well, but be very careful. AI is getting better, but it still makes things up. If you're interviewing an author, read their latest book, particularly if that's why you're talking to them. They might be on a book tour and want to make themselves available, so please read the book.
If it's a politician, read their Wikipedia page and news stories about them, as well as other interviews. When you know what they're likely to say, you can anticipate questions.
Have a roadmap for the interview in mind, maybe written down, including that written preamble that introduces the person and the subject matter and the list of questions. But the list of questions should be a guide and not a constraint. You're having a conversation. And as I said before, if there's one thing people can't avoid overhearing, it's an intimate conversation.
So listen to the answers and follow up. I've heard people doggedly sticking to their list of questions, unwilling to depart from it and ask important follow up questions when they would have made a more interesting interview.
Interview styles vary a lot. Some people interrupt their interviewees regularly because they're concerned about their interviewees rambling. Others like to let the guest talk, so you'll need to find the style that works for you and that you feel leaves your audience informed.
Don't overlook the importance of insisting that your guest gets their sound as good as they can get it. On some occasions, I've been so grateful that my guest has given me an interview that I've been less insistent than I should have been about the way they sounded, and that has always come back to haunt me when my email box gets flooded with people complaining about the quality of the interview. I now realize I just need to trust my gut about something not sounding good enough.
Eight years ago in New Zealand, I produced a series of podcasts pertaining to the New Zealand election and disability policy, and I scored an interview with the Minister for Disability Issues and she called me while on the road during the election campaign and she was on a cell phone in a coverage area that made her audio drop out and she kind of sounded very robotic.
When you've got an interview with a member of the government during her packed election campaign, it takes a lot of courage to say, "I'm sorry, Minister, but we can't record like this."
Like a lot of things in life, it's all about the way that you phrase things. So I said to her, "Minister, you're going to have a lot of important things to say to people who might potentially vote for you. It's important that you're just as easy to understand as all of your opponents."
So in the end, I waited while she drove to the landline and called me back. I should say, didn't really make a difference because they lost that election anyway.
Built-in laptop microphones, webcams and rooms with way too much acoustical bounce are also common problems, and we seem to have got sadly a lot more tolerant of this nonsense since the pandemic. If you are getting a lot of buffering with an internet interview, it is sometimes just better to phone your guest and start again.
In the worst-case scenario, you may need to postpone the interview until you can record in some better way. Even though you're not responsible for the way someone else sounds, you are responsible for what you consider adequate for your podcast. Take pride in that. It's your reputation on the line, so don't compromise your standards.
In addition to Orphonic, and yes, we are going to come back to that shortly, there are plugins that can try to recover audio, and there's also a very interesting tool on the web at podcast.adobe.com, yes, this is something Adobe is dabbling in, that can do some very impressive things to improve horrible audio. But I use these tools as a last resort.
Don't rely on them. Get the audio as good as you possibly can from the source, particularly if you're recording using a single track editor in a way that won't allow you to mix you and your guest separately afterwards, it's ideal to do a very quick recording to check the balance between you and your guest before you start the real interview.
Let your guests know that that's what you're doing and ask them a question like what they had for breakfast this morning or something that will get them talking. T.Here are tools you can use to even up sound and balances afterwards, but the less work these tools have to do, the better.
There's also a resource I would highly recommend, a book called Beyond Powerful Radio by Valerie Geller. If you're serious about fine-tuning the craft of talking to your audience and conducting a good interview, it is an amazing book.
It's worthwhile and informative. So that's Beyond Powerful Radio by Valerie Geller. The audio version in particular is super. It's on Audible, I'm not sure about BARD.
As you prepare to close your podcast episode, you may like to use an outro with the same music that you used for your intro. If the intro used narration, the outro should probably do so as well.
You can thank people for listening, perhaps offer contact information and a way to provide feedback, and that is your first podcast. Ready to publish yet? No. Maybe and maybe not, I guess. If you want your podcast to sound organic, spontaneous, and grassroots, perhaps you'll be happy to just hit record and publish exactly what got recorded.
Most people will want to make it sound as good as possible, so there are many post-production tasks that you're likely to need to complete. For most people, getting the material recorded is only the beginning.
So that takes us on to post-production. Most people will want to edit their podcast at least to some degree. At the absolute minimum, you want to eliminate long silences at the beginning and end of your podcast. If a user presses play on their podcast player and there's a long delay before your podcast starts to play, they may conclude that there's something wrong with your podcast and skip to the next one.
If there is a long silence at the end of the podcast and listeners have your podcast as part of a playlist, you'll annoy your listeners because there's a long silence before the next item in the playlist starts. All good sound applications have trim silence from ends options, so you can clean up the beginning and end with just a couple of keystrokes and make sure that the beginning and end is tight.
Some people like to edit their podcast as little as possible. Melissa was referring to this earlier, kind of maintaining the view that in real life most people will insert the occasional verbal filler into their speech and it's not necessary to cut them all out.
They let the conversation flow and they only take the virtual knife to the virtual tape when there's something really serious, like a very long pause or a cough or something like that, or someone starts an answer over. And others will edit almost obsessively so that unnecessary utterances are removed. I am in that latter category these days. I respect that listeners have limited time.
That said, if you edit and it sounds glaringly obvious that you've done an edit, unless there's a very good reason for making that edit, it's usually better to undo that edit and leave it as it was because bad editing can be distracting for listeners too. Especially in the beginning as you're getting used to whatever software you choose, editing might take you a long time.
You may try and edit, hear that it hasn't worked out for you, and then you can undo the edit and try it again. Rinse and repeat. All good sound editors have an undo function, and it's kind of like a word processor, so most editors respect the Control Z command in Windows and Command Z in Mac OS to perform an undo. There is usually also a redo command in case you undo one or two things too many.
NPR has produced an excellent guide on recording and editing. The editing tips are very good. If you do a search for The Producer's Handbook to Mixing Audio Stories, it should come right up.
Some people choose to outsource the task of editing their podcast, and we talked briefly about this. If you're podcasting for business purposes and not just as a hobby, paying for an expert to do the job well could provide the touch of class and professionalism you want for your business.
A professional podcast post-production service will not only edit your podcast but also take care of dynamic range compression and other issues that have an impact on the listenability of your podcast. If you type podcast editing service into your search engine, you'll find no shortage of companies offering these sorts of services.
Now, I always like to support blind-owned businesses where I can and there are blind people out there who will do an outstanding job of editing your podcast. If you don't mind throwing a little money at the problem, it's one major thing off your plate. But whether you do it or someone else does it, a good podcast does need editing.
The next thing I suggest you do is apply some post-production processing. There are several modifications that might be necessary. If you've recorded in a noisy environment where there's a constant noise like an air conditioning unit or a heater or a constant hum, you may need to apply some noise reduction or, as Will said earlier, you could try a noise gate.
Many Digital Audio Workstation packages have noise reduction and noise gate options. The noise reduction features usually involve selecting a small portion of the sound that contains just the noise you want to eliminate, and you then run the noise reduction tool and your sound package of choice and it tries to reduce the offending sound.
If the noise is too tricky to remove or the noise reduction hasn't been configured correctly, you may end up removing sound you really didn't mean to get rid of, you really did need to keep it, and you can get dreadful artifacts that sound like you or your guests are underwater.
This is why it's always good to make every effort you can to reduce the noise at the time of recording rather than electronically afterwards. Now, there are a new generation now of AI-based plugins that you can get for Digital Audio Workstation software that try to automate a lot of this and they can be quite effective.
Another common post-production effect is dynamic range compression. This is a totally different process from compressing a file so that it takes less space, which is what we talked about earlier. Dynamic range compression makes sounds more even. It can make softer sounds sound louder and louder sounds sound softer.
On a podcast, this is very important because many people are listening through small phone speakers or they can be in cars or on public transport where there's a lot of background noise.
Your listeners don't want to be constantly twiddling the volume to turn you down and your guest up. As best you can, you should try to make sure that the volume of sounds doesn't vary much at all in your recording.
But inevitably recording can get complicated. The complexity increases the more people that you are recording. People can move away from their microphone a little and speak more softly or more loudly depending on the emotions that they're feeling.
Originally, compressors were boxes that you would connect to your mixer, but over the years it's become possible to perform these tasks in software either as you record or afterwards as part of the post-production process. What complicates the use of compressors is that they work differently depending on the tool that you use.
There are many software compressors available, which means that even when you've decided on a Digital Audio Workstation application that meets your particular needs, you could have two or three compression options that seem to work in contradictory ways.
For example, you might have a simple basic compressor that is more aggressive about what it considers to be loud sound the more you increase the percentage. A completely contrasting and very common approach is a compressor based on threshold.
This way, the lower you set the threshold, the more compression you'll get because you're telling the compressor to compress sounds below a specific volume.
So when it comes to dynamic range compression, I can't make any specific suggestions about how to set everything up because the controls vary from DAW to DAW and even the plugin that you choose to use in the DAW.
The good thing is that a lot of these plugins offer presets and you can try applying those listening to what they sound like and undo the application of the effect if you don't like the results.
Some apps also offer a preview function, which makes auditioning these effects more straightforward.
I'd advise subscribing to an email list or Facebook group for the DAW software that you've chosen and ask knowledgeable people what they are using to apply dynamic range compression to spoken word content.
They may suggest downloading or buying a plugin for your DAW software or there may be something built in. There are a lot of these options actually built into REAPER once you buy it. So follow the steps that people suggest and see what you think.
If your ears tell you that your audio sounds too punchy and a bit sort of distorted, trust your instincts and roll back the compression. Hope you've enjoyed that and we will conclude our look at podcasting as a blind person next week here on Access On.
That concludes this episode of Access On, the technology podcast of the National Federation of the Blind. To send in a contribution for a future episode, email us, attach an audio clip or just write it down and send it to [email protected], that's [email protected].
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That's [email protected]. To learn more about the National Federation of the Blind, visit our website, nfb.org or phone us 410-659-9314, that's 410-659-9314. And be sure to check out the Nation's Blind Podcast right from where you heard this podcast.