Whenever I go to new media conferences, there seems to be an unexpected “ah-ha” moment that catches me by surprise. One of those moments was when I was walking into the room where the podcaster Q&A panel discussion was to happen on Sunday morning.

I overheard a conversation about new media for the visually or hearing impaired on Sunday morning. I was a big advocate to make closed captioning work properly during severe weather events when I was in broadcasting, so the conversation instantly caught my attention. The question was: Why don’t new media professionals make their content available so these people can consume it? Answer: I would bet that very few have even thought of it before.

One of the big themes that’s coming out of new media lately is making your content available to as many people as possible. Don’t simply focus on distribution via RSS. Make it easy on your website. Post your content to other places so people can find it easier. Why not include this segment of the population in that same strategy?

Most video produced on the internet goes through some sort of editing. It would be pretty easy to create a version with subtitles or “closed captioning” for those that are hearing impaired. For those that do audio, it makes show notes even more important. If you can get your podcast transcribed, making it available to the hearing impaired (let alone improved search engine results), can help in that respect. I talked with one closed captioning advocate several years ago. He said that the hearing impaired community is fiercely local to media and to companies that go out of their way to make content available to them via closed captioning. From a marketing standpoint, that sounds pretty good to me.

So, what can YOU do to make your content more available to the hearing or visually impaired? Do you think it is worth it? Let’s start the conversation…

ADDITION: Apparently iTunes version 7.4 supports closed captioning in Quicktime.