This is a wake-up to everyone looking into transcribing content if you haven’t already. I’ve been doing the work, both transcribing and publishing media with captioning, but I haven’t been on the money end of things before.
We recently send a number of audio files to a quality transcription service who charges $150 an hour or $2.50 a min to transcribe audio. At these rates, it will cost us approximately more than $3700 for twenty three recorded lectures!
I’m not hear to complain about the costs since I think that $2.50 is pretty realistic for quality transcribing. I don’t know much about the business. I wouldn’t be able to say how much lower I think this charges could be. With higher demand and more competition, I wonder how sustainable business could be charging much under $2 a min.
The message I want to get out to other online course designers, program managers, and accessibility specialists is can we afford to transcribe all public audio content coming out of the university? Those fees don’t cover person-hours required to publish those transcriptions along with the media. The time to add transcriptions for video takes the least amount of time. I’m thinking 5-20 min depending upon the length of the video and publishing platform. Other formats, like published Captivate files can take considerably longer. How much to you pay your designers and multimedia specialists an hour? Multiply that for each video and then each course or website you support.
Please don’t mistake my post as an argument against accessibility. I strongly support designing for accessibility–what benefits a few, benefits all. We do have to take these costs into account when developing our budgets. I have a feeling that’s not really being done right now.