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Wanderlust

Why transcripts matter

Every video you add can carry a transcript: a plain text file (.srt, .vtt, or .txt) holding the words spoken in the video.

Attaching one takes a few minutes. Here is what those minutes buy — for the people taking your tour, and for you.

For the people using your tour

Deaf and hard-of-hearing visitors can use your content at all. Without a transcript or captions, a narrated video is silence. Around 1 in 5 people experience some degree of hearing loss (World Health Organization, 2021), and that share rises sharply with age — which matters if your audience skews toward museum members, retirees, or school groups with mixed needs.

People who cannot turn the sound on. A visitor on a bus, in a shared office, in a quiet gallery, or on a phone with no headphones. They are not disabled; they just cannot listen right now. A transcript is the difference between engaging and scrolling past.

Non-native speakers. Reading a second language is very often easier than following spoken audio at natural pace, with an accent, over ambient noise. For a tour aimed at international visitors or diaspora audiences, a transcript widens who can actually follow along.

People who process written words more comfortably than audio, including many autistic and ADHD visitors, and anyone who wants to re-read a detail rather than scrub backwards through a video looking for it.

Anyone who wants to skim. Video is slow to search. Text is not.

For you as a creator

Search engines read text, not video. A video is nearly opaque to a search crawler; its transcript is not. Attaching one turns every spoken word into indexable content on your tour page. This is usually the single largest SEO gain available to a media-heavy site.

Your content becomes reusable. A transcript is the raw material for exhibit labels, social captions, a printed handout, a grant application narrative, or a translation. You already did the work of saying it; the transcript is what lets you say it again somewhere else without starting over.

Translation gets much cheaper. Translating a text file is straightforward and inexpensive. Translating spoken audio means transcription first, so you pay for that step anyway — just later, and usually in a hurry.

Accessibility is often a funding requirement. Public grants, cultural funds, and institutional partners increasingly ask what a project does for disabled audiences. "Every video is transcribed" is a concrete, checkable answer. Its absence is a gap a reviewer will notice.

It is the law in more places than people expect. Many public institutions are covered by accessibility legislation that treats captions and transcripts for prerecorded video as a baseline requirement, not an enhancement.

The standard we build to

Wanderlust targets WCAG 2.1 Level AA across every learner-facing surface. For prerecorded video, the relevant criteria are:

  • 1.2.2 Captions (Level A) — captions are provided for prerecorded audio content in synchronised media.
  • 1.2.3 Audio Description or Media Alternative (Level A) — an alternative for time-based media is provided.

Level A is the floor, not the stretch goal. A video with no transcript and no captions does not meet it.

How to add one

  1. Upload the transcript file to your media library, choosing the Transcript kind. .srt, .vtt, and .txt are all accepted.
  2. Open the video in your media library and attach the transcript to it.

If you do not have a transcript yet, most video editors and phone dictation tools can produce a first draft that you correct by hand. Correcting matters: an uncorrected automatic transcript full of errors is frustrating in a way that no transcript is not, and names, places, and specialist vocabulary are exactly what automatic tools get wrong.

Write it yourself, or fix a draft yourself. Every word a visitor reads on Wanderlust should come from a human who was there.

References

World Health Organization. (2021). World report on hearing. https://www.who.int/publications/i/item/9789240020481

World Wide Web Consortium. (2018). Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1. https://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG21/