static_whisper | Behind The Pod - S01, Episode 5: Kess (Reply)

Behind The Pod - Series (or Season) 1, Episode 5: Kess. Dated: December 2019.

Summary: Talking about disability and podfic, the podfic community, and podfic as art.

Their experience with CFS [Chronic Fatigue Syndrome] and being able to listen to fic that they could no longer read through the exhaustion and pain. They made a lot of beginner ‘Eh’ podfic and found community. The performance art bit came after talking about listening to Text-to-Speech versions of fic with no emotion. Overall, not what I was expecting from the basic description.

Clarification: There’s nothing wrong with a personal perspective. Based on the description and starting with series or season 2 episodes with multiple people taking part in each episode, I just wasn’t expecting one person’s perspective. While I’ve seen podfic presented as a beneficial accessibility feature for visual text based fic, some podficcers who view podficcing as performance art seem to make stylistic choices that don’t necessarily align with accessibility being the main feature of this type of fanwork.

In a prior Auralphonic episode that touched on the history of a “No Music Included” attitude, there seemed to be a quick jump to people being okay with additional sound tracks and effects once editing skills improved, but that comes across like hearing listeners made that switch. I mean, listeners with auditory processing issues and hard of hearing listeners didn’t just fade away, and to me, the original accessibility question is still there.

Some reading advice has come across like it’s assumed that listeners who want the full text can just go read the fanfic, so info like indicating to and from fields in emails is optional. From the perspective of someone who has done volunteer image descriptions here on tumblr, that seems presumptive about what the audience will find important. I’m not saying it’s wrong to make that choice as a podficcer, but I wouldn’t say that’s keeping accessibility and potential listeners who are blind or visually impaired in mind.

I’ve run into quite a bit of encouragement for nervous beginners about not letting an accent or reading in a non-native/fluent language get in the way of trying to make podfic, so I also thought there might be a mention of podficcers who don’t have a normate voice.