I recently learned about a service offered by Odiogo in which your blog posts are automatically transformed into audio content. This is an easy way to offer more accessible content on your blog, and if you’ve been here in the last few days, you might have noticed I’m using it, too. Odiogo makes it incredibly easy to get started. You simply supply your blog or feed URL and your email address, and Odiogo guides you from there, depending on which blogging platform you happen to use.
In my case, I’m using WordPress, so the instructions were tailored to WordPress. I simply downloaded a plugin, configured it with the recommended settings, and the audio content was almost immediately available on my blog. One really nice feature of this free service is that it allows end users the ability to subscribe to the audio feed as a podcast.
If you run a blog, I highly recommend trying out this service. Visually impaired users may have screen readers available to them, but the ones who don’t might struggle with low-vision settings unless you provide an alternate version of the content. Furthermore, they might just subscribe to the audio feed and avoid the text content entirely, making it more likely that they’ll get your content on a regular basis.
