Lawsuit Challenges Inaccessibility of Major Podcast Platforms
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Podcast symbol (via Wikimedia)
December 14, 2021– New York, NY—The National Association of the Deaf (“NAD”) and Disability Rights Advocates (“DRA”) have filed a lawsuit against three major providers of podcasts, SiriusXM, Stitcher, and Pandora, to end their exclusion of deaf and hard of hearing Americans from each company’s extensive podcast streaming service. Read the complaint here.
Sirius XM bills itself as the “new destination for original, exclusive, and popular podcasts,” providing customers access to a slate of both original and third-party podcast content, including exclusive access to podcasts produced by Marvel Entertainment.
Stitcher ranked #1 in Triton Digital’s Report of top Podcast Networks for August 2021, with 451 active original podcasts. Likewise, Pandora’s podcast service offers users access to hundreds of thousands of podcast episodes. Yet none of these multimillion-dollar companies provides transcripts for the plethora of podcasts available on their popular mobile applications.
Because Defendants do not make transcripts or captions available for any of the podcasts offered on their platforms, more than 48 million deaf [...]