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Comment by TedDoesntTalk

6 years ago

As soon as I saw it was audio only, i left the site. Why do sites do this? How many people actually stick to the page and listen to that?

12 comments

TedDoesntTalk

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asveikau  6 years ago

> How many people actually stick to the page and listen to that?

I just did. 3 minutes wasn't that bad and I wasn't somewhere where it would be a problem.

> Why do sites do this?

NPR is a radio network. I have seen that often they do transcribe their clips. I am not sure what the process they have for that looks like, but it seems this particular clip didn't get transcribed.

Edit: looks like they do have a transcription mentioned elsewhere in the thread. So seems like some kind of UI fail.

danso  6 years ago

NPR does transcribe (many, most?) its audio stories, but usually there's a delay of a day or so – the published timestamp for this story is 5:06AM (ET) today.

edit: looks like there's a text version of the article. I'm assuming this is a CMS issue: there's an audio story and a "print story", but the former hadn't been linked to the latter: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23628790

  • dhosek  6 years ago

    They transcribe all their stories. Back before the web was widespread, you could call or write NPR and have them mail a transcript to you.

013a  6 years ago

Well, if anyone were going to do it, you'd think no one would be surprised about it being the "National Public Radio"

  • dvtrn  6 years ago

    Accessibility still matters, or should still matter even if you’re a radio station, but probably especially if you’re a news radio station.

    • vermontdevil  6 years ago

      NPR is fantastic when it comes to accessibility by providing transcripts. I linked the page thinking the transcript will come later as they usually do. But turns out it was a wrong link. See elsewhere for the correct link.

ajzinsbwbs  6 years ago

Most people are going to hear the story on the radio or in a podcast app / RSS feed. It’s useful to have the story indexed on a shareable web link where it can be played on different platforms without any setup. If I wanted to share a podcast episode with friends in a group chat, a link like this would be a good way to do it. Since this is more of a long-form text discussion forum I’d probably look for a text format before posting here.