Making Your Podfic (especially with Music and/or Sound Effects) More Accessible and Listener Friendly
So you're planning to make a podfic with music and/or sound effects, and you want to think about ways to make it more accessible? Awesome!! This will guide you through some steps you can take to make your podfic more accessible, some of which will also make for a more pleasant listening experience for listeners without accessibility needs, but the focus will primarily be on accessibility. Some of this will also be applicable to podfics with multiple recording sessions without music or sound effects, but again, that's not the focus.
What's the number one thing you can do to make your podfic with music and/or sound effects more accessible to those with noise sensitivity, auditory processing conditions, who are somewhat hard of hearing, or other auditory accessibility needs?
MAKE A CLEAN VERSION, with NO music or sound effects! This can be a very easy change to your process for most people! After editing out mistakes and doing your audio clean up but before you add music or sound effects, simply export your audio. Upload it wherever you upload your final version, drop in a second link to the no music/sound effects version, and that's it! Of course, this may not be trivial for some people, depending on your individual process or other factors. I hope you will decide that it's worth doing anyway. As someone with audio accessibility needs myself, I can tell you it makes a HUGE difference. There are podficcers I love who I can't listen to some of what they've recorded because there's no version without music/sound effects, or sometimes I can only listen on a good day. There are fics I love where there's a podfic version, but I will never be able to listen to it because there's more music/sounds effects than I can handle. This one change will make people like me VERY happy and will expand your audience!
Secondly, especially if you've got a lot of audio dynamics (really quiet whispery bits and also really loud shouty bits), be sure to use the Compressor tool. Long story short, the compressor makes the actual noise level of the quiet bits louder and the loud bits quieter, while still leaving the impression of whispering or shouting. In other words, keep the emotion, but don't force your listeners to keep changing the volume on their headphones/speakers/hearing aid to be able to hear what you're saying or avoid getting their ears blown out (very useful for other listeners too, especially people listening on headphones or in the car). A quick overview of how to use the Compressor settings (this is for Audacity, which is what I'm most familiar with, but most audio editing tools will have something similar):
Threshold: how loud do you want to go before starting to make things quieter?
Make-up gain: after compressing the loud bits down, how much do you want to make everything louder to make up for it?
Knee width: how quickly and starkly do you want the compression to apply? At 0db, this will be a very sharp change. Lower levels will lead to less sharp changes
Ratio: for the loud bits that are getting compressed, how much compression should be applied? The higher the Ratio the more the loud parts of the audio will be compressed.
Okay, but maybe you want to ALSO make the version with music and/or sound effects more accessible, since that's your vision for the podfic and you want as many people as possible to be able to experience it? Great! PLEASE still make a version without music/sound effects as noted above, because even doing everything you can won't be enough for everyone. But it's also great to do what you can to make your music/sound effects version accessible for those that are able to enjoy it with some changes. So….what are some things you can do?
As much as possible, avoid putting music or Foley over your words. For people with audio processing issues especially, it can be very difficult to parse words when there's background music (and especially background music that itself has words).
If you're going to have music or Foley over words, make sure the words are significantly louder than the music. You can use the Analyze Contrast tool (in the Analyze menu in Audacity) to compare the relative loudness of two selections.
For music or Foley between words (like in a section break), make sure it's not too much louder or softer than the sections that come before and after. Again, use that Analyze Contrast tool to compare selections.
You can also use Analyze Contrast to even out the sound between recording sessions!
For sound effects that modify your voice, go only to the point where your voice still sounds very intelligible to you. Someone with auditory accessibility needs will likely struggle with intelligibility well before someone without those needs.
Hope this was helpful!
(This is written from my perspective as someone who has audio accessibility needs, as well as being a podficcer myself. Beta help and additional thoughts from @writerproblem193 @keriarentikai @xiaokuer-schmetterling and others not on Tumblr. But this is not The Definitive Guide To Accessibility or anything, so please add your perspective!)



















