There’s a small section titled, “Where to Put Transcripts,” towards the bottom of the W3C’s (organization behind WCAG) transcript page that reads:
Make it is easy for users to know that a transcript is available and to get to the transcript. For example, put the transcript itself or a link to the transcript right under the video.
For media on your website, usually it’s best to include the transcript on the same page.
When your media is hosted elsewhere, you might have the transcript on a separate web page.
Well, well, well… have we got a nice surprise for you.
There’s no need to bury the lede – we built Transcript Host, the first dedicated platform for hosting text transcripts. It’s for accessibility, but it has a lot of other nice bonuses, too.
Let’s talk transcript shop.
Table of Contents
Why We Created Transcript Host
Here we have this podcast on ADA compliance and we don’t have a good place to put our own text transcripts. They didn’t really belong on Accessible.org – this would have completely tampered with our site’s organizational structure and our transcripts weren’t really blog posts.
So we ended up creating an entirely separate website to host our own transcripts, but that took a lot of time and there were some great features that weren’t available.
And if this was a problem for us, we knew it was a problem for millions of podcasters as well as others who need a place to put there transcripts. Thus, TranscriptHost.com.
Let’s go further into the details.
Problems
Publishing transcripts directly on your website creates real problems that most content creators don’t realize until they’ve published multiple episodes.
They Don’t Fit
First, transcripts aren’t really content intended for your website. Rather, they’re alternatives to content you already offer. Your transcripts don’t belong as another post or page because they’re neither; they just don’t fit seamlessly.
Maybe Search Results
Also, your site search results will now include transcript results which, again, may or may not make sense because people who search are looking for specific content rather than topics discussed on a podcast.
Not Blog Posts
Third, If your blog feed that shows your most recent posts and you publish your transcripts as a post, your transcripts will show up as new blog posts.
SEO
Because of these issues, you’ll need to create a separate silo within your website for transcripts. This can create SEO problems for multiple reasons, one being that your crawl budget may be used on transcripts rather than content you intend on ranking. Another being that the content and topics aren’t really structured. One more possibility: duplicate content.
When you consider the fact that some podcasts and content libraries are massive, a third-party platform that can organize everything makes a lot of sense – not only for SEO, but other reasons as well.
Third-Party Hosting
Think about how you handle video content – while you may embed videos throughout your site, you don’t actually host them there. Instead, you use platforms like YouTube or Vimeo. The same principle applies perfectly to transcripts.
A dedicated transcript hosting platform provides a clean, professional URL you can share anywhere your content appears. This approach separates your transcript from your primary content while maintaining a seamless connection between them.
When you upload your transcript to a third-party platform, you immediately get a unique URL that can be linked from:
- Your podcast show notes
- YouTube video descriptions
- Social media posts
- Email newsletters
- Any place you promote your content
WCAG Requirements
WCAG success criterion 1.2.1 (Level A) specifically requires transcripts for prerecorded audio-only content like podcasts. This is a non-negotiable requirement for WCAG conformance.
For video content, unless you’re only concerned with Level A conformance, you don’t need a transcript.
- Success Criterion 1.2.2 (Level A): Regular videos with audio need captions
- Success Criterion 1.2.3 (Level A): Videos need either a text description or audio description
- Success Criterion 1.2.5 (Level AA): Videos need audio description
However, you can score some really nice marketing, usability (UX), and accessibility points with a text transcript for your videos. Also, if your YouTube channel is really a podcast, you’re probably repurposing your video content into Spotify and Apple Podcasts traditional audio podcasts so you may as well go 100% and get a text transcript.
How Third-Party Hosting Works
The process for implementing third-party transcript hosting is straightforward and follows these simple steps:
- Create or obtain your transcript (using services like Descript, Otter.ai, or even AI tools like ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini)
- Upload your transcript to your chosen hosting platform
- Receive a unique, clean URL for your transcript
- Add this URL to your content descriptions and promotion materials
When users click the link, they’re taken to a dedicated page containing just the transcript, optimized for reading, searching, and accessibility. The entire experience remains professional and focused.
Marketing Benefits
While ADA compliance and WCAG 2.1 AA conformance may be your primary motivator, there are numerous additional benefits to hosting with TranscriptHost.com.
Your transcripts become independently discoverable assets. When someone searches for a specific topic you’ve covered in your podcast or video, they might find your transcript first – creating another entry point to your content ecosystem.
User experience improves dramatically when people can choose how they consume your content. Some prefer listening, others watching, and still others reading. By providing all options, you meet every preference.
Content repurposing becomes effortless when you have a clean, searchable transcript. Need to pull a quote for social media? Want to reference a specific point in a blog post? Done.
Analytics insights from transcript views can reveal which topics generate the most interest and which sections people find most valuable – information you can use to guide future content creation.
Next Step
We like the link to a third-party hosted transcript route and we’re hoping you will too.
If you’d like a simple place to host all of your podcasts, try TranscriptHost.com. It’s specifically built for:
- accessibility
- usability
- compliance
