Last month we saw the launch of the first episode of the EBU Access Cast. Our podcast is specifically focused on technical news about Assistive technology, as well as improvements about new accessibility standards and methods used in Europe and around the world. Since our first episode came out, we started to get feedback from listeners, therefore in this article we will explain how to navigate through our web page, and which methods you can use to follow us and how you can subscribe to the podcast.
There are 2 ways you can find the EBU Access Cast page. The first is to locate us through the EBU web page, or you can go directly to our external homepage.
When you land on our home page, you will be presented with the list of episodes. Each episode is labelled with the title, which is marked by heading, so screen reader users can quickly find the episode, which they would like to listen to. In the case of our second episode, the heading is called “EBU Access Cast 02”. After opening the link, you are presented with the full show notes for the episode, which guide you to the other sources mentioned in the podcast. In practise that means that if you click on the link for the Google Home, you will be taken to an external Wikipedia page, which provides detailed information about Google Home. At the end of each episode, there are links for contacting us via email and twitter. Right after the end of the show notes there is a button for playback and pause. If you click this button, you will automatically start playback of the selected episode.
We are aware of the fact that current HTML player is not labelled properly and that screen readers display this button as unlabelled or that the button is called just a button, and we are working on fixing the solution for the future. However if you would like to listen the episode in some other player like Winamp, you need to scroll down until screen readers report “clickable download” or just “download”. After you click on this option, a standard open/save dialog box opens which allows you to download the file to your device, or if you select open, the file will be temporarily opened and your music player of choice will start playing the episode.
However if you would like to use another ways of catching our newest content, it is also possible to manually subscribe to the EBU Access Cast and listen to it with your favourite podcasting player of choice for the podcasts by the RSS feed.
Alternatively, find the EBU Access Cast on iTunes, subscribe to the podcast and listen to us directly from the iTunes. We are looking for new ways to get out our podcast in the other sources such as Google play, so that users who are using the devices such as Google Home also can get the advantage of listening to our podcast directly via Google Home.
Happy listening
Mario Percinic
Accessibility specialist