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

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.

Behind The Pod - Series (or Season) 2, Episode 5: Podficcers of Color Roundtable. Dated: August 2020.

Don’t be afraid of reading a CoC focused fic as a non-PoC podficcer. (It’s not up to podficcers of color to try to read everything, y’know?) Depending on the character, you can do research like doing so for other accents and languages, but non-Black podficcers should avoid ‘blaccent’ or a caricature of AAVE.

Auralphonic Episode 36: How We Choose What to Podfic. Dated: January 2018.

Various reasons: Drawn to certain authors (writing style), or permission factors in (waiting for replies vs blanket permission [BP] and mostly relying on FPS List). [FPS List = Fanworks Permission List organizes Fanlore’s BP page by fandom.] Some people have done a lot of outreach with particular fandoms. Pod farr (riff on pon farr from Star Trek), or the excitement of needing to record Right Now. Changes in when you can record and how long you can record (f’ex, one host can’t record for more than one hour at a time these days). Personal reasons (only read below a certain word count, liking certain tropes, doing different voices, etc.). The one host makes a point of doing relatively short podfic that match environmental factors (f’ex, it’s raining where you are, so you do a fic that involves rain).

You don’t always love the fic you read, though. Challenges can have requirements (Podbang, ITPE (Informal Twitter Podfic Exchange), Podfic Bingo, Amplificathon, etc.). Some collaborative challenges may involve working with other podficcers and cross fandoms. Some charity exchanges [listeners donate to XYZ, podficcers will read certain requested fandoms and such] also might not be what you like (or even be a fandom you’re in, officially speaking).

Auralphonic Episode 27: Podfic Permission. Dated: March 2017.

I’m rather late to some of the controversy around whether it’s a requirement or a courtesy to get permission from fanfic authors [see also: Podfic Permission], especially when certain fandoms have different etiquette around this [references episode 26 about My Little Pony where fans do not get or expect permission to podfic]. For people who don’t list permission in their AO3 profile, you can check the Fanlore pages Blanket Permission to Podfic and Blanket No to Podfic where lists of users have already been compiled.

From Episode 36: FPS List = Fanworks Permission List organizes Fanlore’s BP page by fandom.