Accessibility
A fair world needs to account for accessibility throughout society. We aren’t perfect, but we can make things better. We should make reasonable accommodations before we are forced to do something.
Imagine a world where every hotel had no braille on doors, water fountains, restrooms, or elevator buttons. Every hotel thinks that braille is not necessary. Every manager says that blindness is extremely rare. “Besides,” they would say, “blind people should only travel with sighted chaperones.” No hotel would take action on braille until the first time that it hosted a convention for the blind. In this world, no hotels would have braille because most blind people would avoid hotels that dismissed or infantilized them. They would not have conventions at a hotel. Nothing would change. The situation would never improve.
When people with disabilities stay out of public life, people make assumptions. They wrongly believe that a person with a disability is rarer than a non-aero drop bar or an Australian drop bear.
We tend to overestimate the cost of accommodating someone with a disability. As a result, an accessibility feature can seem like something extra. It is nice to have but not essential.
In reality, most provisions are not expensive luxuries. For example, when the factory makes the buttons for an elevator, it is easy to change the production machines so that they punch in the braille bumps on each button. Additionally, the bumps can help sighted people to feel smooth buttons in low-light situations. Therefore, the braille bumps help everybody and hurt nobody. We call these benefits the curb cut effect.
The Curb Cut Effect
Accessibility improvements have a huge impact for some people. For everyone else, these changes have the so-called curb cut effect.
That term gets its name from the original curb cut—the part of the sidewalk curb that is a ramp instead of a cliff’s edge. This cutout is vital for the person who uses a wheelchair, but the effect is to help everyone who uses that sidewalk.
Picture the entrance to a building that is a little higher than the sidewalk. The traditional plan would put the entrance one step up from the sidewalk. Instead of the step, however, imagine a ramp.
The ramp makes it possible for someone with a wheelchair to independently enter or exit the building, but other people also reap the benefits. Think of the worker moving heavy furniture into a store, the father pushing a stroller into a medical office, and the injured woman using crutches as she visits a friend’s home.
That is the curb cut effect. Everyone benefits.
The curb cut effect applies elsewhere too. A voice-over or audio narration is necessary for those with vision disabilities, People who can read unassisted will be able to get through books and articles while their hands are not free. They can also listen in when walking or, yes, while washing dishes.
The Deaf will use transcripts for podcast episodes. The ideal is to have live interpretation in the sign language of that place. Just as the hearing use tone of voice, the Deaf do more than replace written words with handmade symbols. Logistically, this is possible for certain state events, and especially with high-definition video. Transcripts aren’t the same experience, but they make consumption possible for the Deaf and provide other benefits as well.
Those who are learning the target language will appreciate transcripts during podcasts or during TV news. Also, hearing is not all or nothing. Damage can be progressive and hearing can be partial. A transcript is like anything: It’s better to have it and not need it than to need it and not have it. Transcripts and soft subtitles can also
Affordability
Just as we need to recognize disabilities, we must be mindful of economic class. The Yellow Light strives to present content in the way that costs the least in terms of energy and equipment. At the same time, we want to maintain the minimum of quality. The World Wide Web should be for all the people in the world, not just for the richest countries or well-off people, and their experiences should be good and not just “good enough.”
The Yellow Light does not want to impose extra costs on followers. Expenses come in the form of patent fees, high-speed connections, energy, and more expensive devices. If someone distributes content in large and complex files, then the user must have a robust internet connection and a personal smartphone or a newer computer. If the file is too complex or requires conversion, then that file will more quickly drain a device’s batteries.
Compatibility
- Alt text
Every image will have alternative text to describe it. - Transcripts
The initial plan was to have each episode of the podcast feature the dialog written out in a VTT file that notes the speaker at each segment. Transcripts open the door for people with hearing loss and assist English learners. The embedded player from Public Radio Exchange (PRX) displays transcripts and speaker labels. Unfortunately, the task of timing a transcript (e.g., 0:10′031–0:11′405) for every single utterance is the greatest time suck. Most cheap solutions use GenAI to also guess the content, which I can edit, but it raises ethical quandaries. The environmental and ethical costs of GenAI include: mining limited resources; making chips; distributing materials; “training” the word-guessing, plagiarizing machines; constructing data centers; burning fossil fuels; using up water to cool the servers. On the other hand, GenAI may save energy by cutting the time spent on subtitles by several orders of magnitude while performing the original, if neglected, promise of improved accessibility. - Voice-overs
You can listen to every article. You can play a voice-over directly through Ghost’s embedded player on the website or download the audio file. Because you are listening to a human, your brain has an easier time with processing and remembering information. The positive effects of avoiding a GenAI narrator and using a human will hold true even when you cannot readily tell if the voice is human or GenAI. - Loudness
Every audio and video file from The Yellow Light has the same perceptual loudness. Listeners will not have to adjust the volume controls back and forth when using the embedded players or when playing back downloads on a program that cannot normalize the volume. The files use the standard loudness of most podcasts: -16 dB LUFS, with a tolerance of +/−1 dB, and a maximum of −1 dBTP in reference to the so-called true peaks at the over-sampled rate of 192 kHz. This ensures a consistent listening experience that also prevents clipping or other distortion. - Audio formats
In order to accommodate slower connection speeds, use less energy, play on any almost any device, allow accurate seeking, and remain clear, the podcasts are in plain MP3 files, stereo, at a constant bit-rate of 128 kbps and a sampling rate of 44.1 kHz. - Document formats
Files with text will not be in Microsoft- or Apple-only formats. PDF files are the solution. They look the same everywhere, run anywhere, and print easily. Plus, you can open them with the simplest of programs on the cheapest of computers. Plain-text files are in Markdown, have filenames with the suffix of “.txt,” use the <CR><LF> to end lines, and close with a blank line—for maximum compatibility. Every language uses letters and punctuation not in the basic character set. Of the various standards for text encoding, UTF-8 (Unicode) is the most inclusive; all competitors have fallen by the wayside. - Image formats
Pictures files will be GIF, JPEG, or PNG. - Tags
Every podcast episode has an embedded ID3 tag. This ensures that the cover art and almost all of the information from a podcast app stays with the file after download. To be compatible with almost everything after February 1999, the ID3 tags are version 2.3 and not 2.4 (which never gained traction). The image within each tag measures 200 by 200 pixels JPEG (8-bits-per-channel RGB with no transparency or progressive optimization). The entire tag weighs under 200 kB. - Organization
Every podcast episode will have notes in the ID3 tag for the title of the podcast (artist, album), author (album artist), and copyright. In each episode in the RSS feed and ID3 tag, are the item’s title, the episode number (track), and show notes (comment). When a podcast series is episodic and not serialized, no episode will have a season (“disc”) number.
Transcript Policy
The Yellow Light’s transcripts are soft. Such files stand in contrast to so-called hard subtitles—text that is “burned in” the video itself. The choice to use soft or hard subtitles (closed or open captions) concerns several issues.
- Quality
If you want to burn in the subtitles and keep the video file at the same size, then you have to lower the quality of the video. If you want to keep the video’s quality the same with the burned-in subtitles, then you need to make a bigger file or use a more complex format. A bigger file costs more energy to store and send. A more complex format uses more energy to create and play. - Showing or hiding
Moving text and colorful effects can be distracting for some users. No user, however, can change anything if the author etched the subtitles into the video permanently - Editing
With soft subtitles, you have a separate subtitle file in order to translate the dialog or to fix mistakes. The author can make things easier on English learners by fixing typos, misspellings, or missing words. - Font
When users have soft transcripts, they can change the look of the text by selecting a special font in the player. People with low vision may need to set different colors. Someone who has dyslexia may prefer special thickness and shapes.
Hosting
The Yellow Light holds the domain (theyellowlight.org) for the website, the RSS feed for the podcast, and the address for the email. This also means the exclusive right to self-verify at this location for Bluesky.
Control of the domain is separate from the hosting for the email, the web pages and media files. Because The Yellow Light can control the domain separately, hosting providers can change while maintaining every link out there.
This situation allows for changes to the hosting provider in the future. The hosting provider for the main website had to allow embedded players and file attachments. Beehiiv was not an option because it blocks most file-types. The hosting provider must also allow downloads of voice-over files. Substack, for example, does not allow downloads for voice-overs. For the podcast, it was also necessary to allow the manual addition of transcripts.
As another requirement, the hosting provider should never encode sound files after they are already encoded. SoundCloud (and Substack) re-encode audio, unfortunately.
Encoding Once and Only Once
The Yellow Light encodes audio files with certain consistent specifications. This process of encoding can compress the file by more than 90%. It is a “lossy” compression, but with the right encoding parameters, you can do a single lossy compression without any human being able to hear the difference. Encoding a second time introduces many problems, however.
Some hosts will encode all audio files a second time. This is called re-encoding, If you re-encode a file that was already encoded, then that is like taking a photograph of a photocopy. A photograph is fine. A photocopy is also fine. A photograph of a photocopy is less fine.
If a hosting provider re-encodes audio files, then it degrades the quality of the file and destroys metadata. The final product that listeners receive will lack ID3 tags. The Yellow Light puts an ID3 tag into every podcast file so that the file still has its labels after being downloaded.
The hosting provider that re-encodes content will also rename the files. If a downloaded file has no ID3 tag and the original file-name has changed, then you cannot tell which files are what.
Easy Operation on Every Device
The Yellow Light takes great care to make the audio files sport a virtually universal compatibility. Besides the files themselves, the choice of the hosting service had to mind that the host did not tamper with the files.
If a website automatically re-encodes a file, then the file may also have its sampling rate change. The only issue is the act of distortion during the resampling from a re-sampler that users cannot inspect.
Most physical equipment since 2000 uses the sampling rate of 48 kHz, but the rate of 44.1 kHz is just as good and can capture all sounds that humans can hear. Also, it has long been easy to convert from 48 to 44.1 kHz without any decline in quality.
The rate of 44.1 kHz is rarely the native sampling rate of new devices, but 44.1 kHz hangs on. First, it was the only popular sampling rate for the heyday of the compact disc (CD). Further prolonging 44.1 kHz, several audio-books ended up on so-called MP3 CDs.
Any device that uses 48 kHz internally can take in 44.1 kHz and perform the necessary conversions seamlessly. Several older devices that use 44.1 kHz cannot, however, take in 48 kHz. Hence, it makes sense for many audio files (such as podcasts) to play it safe with 44.1 kHz.
Another problem comes from the additional round of “lossy” compression that happens when the hosting site re-encodes everything. With a file in a format such as MP3, the sound went through one round of lossy compression. You can go through one round of this and never be able to detect a difference with your ears. The story is different when it comes to doing lossy compression on a file that already went through lossy compression. Imagine a photocopy of a photocopy, a JPEG of a JPEG, or a still image from a video camera’s footage of the printout of a smartphone camera’s photograph of a computer monitor.
SoundCloud creates an impossible situation in regards to this. If you upload a lossy file (something like .mp3, which will be very small), then the downloadable version stays as is and will be fine. The streaming version, however, will undergo a second round of destructive compression—not good.
You create new problems if you upload a original file (something like .wav, which will be very large). The streaming version will now undergo lossy compression only once, but the downloadable version is now huge—also not good.