cohost support

Motivation: audio content is not always particularly easy to view.

• maybe you did not bring your headphones and you are on a train
• maybe you are unable to experience audio content just in general and are now excluded from an entire category of posting
• maybe you listened to the audio file but didn’t understand any of the words
• maybe you just don’t want to or have the time to sit there listening for thirty seconds

Usually, this would be solved by use of closed captions/timed text, but they are rather time-consuming to produce, and typically require special tooling. I think that’s too much to ask.

This is a proposal to compromise and add an “alt-text” field to audio attachments (hopefully multiline too for this one):

• some audio posts consist entirely of someone saying words. you could take the time to transcribe it to text and put it in there. No additional timing metadata like for captions, just the text. I think that’s not too big of an ask
• some audio posts are a short sound effect or a silly edit of existing music. you could describe what it is to give context for whatever additional commentary/replies are on the post
• a text description may be less effective for regular music, but you could still make an effort to describe what is going on
• if you have singing, you can also put the lyrics in there
• etc…

While this may not be a web platform feature, having a little “description” disclosure box in audio attachments would be very nice I think. ok that is all

• It reminds people that this is a thing you can do.
• If there is specific formatting that would make best practices for audio transcription easier/automatic, they could be part of the field's default formatting rather than something users have to add themselves in the post body.
  

god absolutely supporting this one.