UK businesses lose approximately £2 billion a month by ignoring the needs of individuals with disabilities. More than 1 in 5 UK consumers have a reported disability, according to research conducted by the Purple Pound. For individuals who are Deaf or hard of hearing, accessibility solutions like transcription can be the make or break of whether or not they are able to do business with a company or even successfully engage with their content.
Companies that enlist UK transcription services in order to provide accessibility to their audiences are better equipped to expand their reach and retain customers and employees as a result.
While you may not be acutely aware of employees or customers with disabilities, most people know someone with a disability, have someone in their family with a disability or may become disabled at some point in their life. When you host an event or publish content on your website without considering accessibility accommodations like captions or a transcript, you are at risk of excluding potential customers and offending others.
Additionally, many of the accommodations such as transcripts which were originally designed to assist individuals with disabilities, hold additional benefits for UK businesses. Companies using transcripts like Verbit’s can not only provide access, but improve their meetings, capture strong notes from client calls, improve their SEO and engage audiences more effectively.
For the best process and to avoid the manual and tedious in-house efforts required to create transcripts to improve access and enhance your materials, here are some elements to consider, including why it’s important to turn to a UK transcription service provider.
Why is it important for companies to use transcription?
Transcription can help UK companies make their in-person and online interactions, events, marketing and videos more accessible and engaging. The most helpful use cases for transcription include:
- Accessibility: In order to meet the requirements outlined by the UK Equality Act companies are required to incorporate accommodations for individuals with disabilities. Transcription provides such a solution for business employees and prospective hires in the form of captioning for onboarding materials and other video resources.
- Record keeping: Professional transcripts of meetings or interviews record important details and save you from trying to remember or debate over what was said. Word-for-word, accurate business transcripts like those produced by Verbit and Take Note can also help to provide companies with legal backing in the unfortunate event of a lawsuit as well.
- Enhanced marketing materials & video: Clients, customers and shareholders can greatly benefit from having access to transcripts to reference along with the videos and content they’re consuming.. Transcripts also create a less tedious process of having to listen to video or audio and write out manually what was said to collect quotes from webinars, podcasts and dictations to repurpose for content.
- Search & discoverability: Transcripts greatly benefit a website’s search engine optimization, or SEO. While Google and other search engines are unable to use video content to help with your search rankings, they are able to scan transcripts. These engines will recognize key words from the transcripts of your event or marketing video dialogue. Then, when individuals are searching for related terms, their chances of coming across your brand or video become much higher.
- Note taking: A UK transcription service, like Take Note, a Verbit company, can also be enlisted to not only provide detailed word-for-word transcripts, but turn these into notes highlighting meetings and conferences. Having access to professional transcripts and note taking solutions is a huge time saver and allows employees to remain engaged and focused in meetings.
Is it important for UK businesses to work with UK transcription companies?
Transcripts should always be created with the target audience in mind. For UK based businesses, or businesses with a customer base located primarily in the UK, utilizing a UK transcription service is likely to better serve your audience’s needs and improve their comprehension. There are three key factors for UK businesses or those marketing to the UK to take into consideration when choosing a transcription provider.
- UK transcription companies understand national equality laws: The UK Equality Act of 2010 requires that businesses make accommodation for individuals with disabilities. It aims to prevent discrimination based on categories, such as age, sex, religion, sexual orientation and political affiliation. Verbit and its UK-based transcription company, Take Note, serve as an essential partner in supporting your need to offer transcripts which adhere to UK Equality legal requirements.
- Take data protection & GDPR compliance into consideration: It can be hard enough to manage your own company’s compliance with all laws and regulations, but making sure that your partners are doing the same can be a whole other ordeal. As a business, you have processes in place to ensure the protection of your data and that of your clients and so it makes sense to enlist a partner like Take Note that understands UK data laws.
The GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) that came into effect in 2018 doesn’t simply make companies responsible for their data and require the reporting of breaches, it levels a number of unique requirements aimed at ensuring the protection of data. Although the UK has left the EU, there is a UK version of the GDPR in domestic law.
Having ISO 27001 and 9001 certifications are another positive sign that a company sees data security as a priority. Companies with these international accreditations have gone through rigorous assessments from independent regulators.
- Transcripts for UK audiences should be in UK English
Choosing a UK audio transcription company which is familiar with British English is invaluable for receiving top quality transcripts that will resonate with UK audiences. The United Kingdom has over 40 dialects meaning that people from different parts of the UK speak the same language differently than many other native English speakers.
Understanding the inflexions of different dialects can make a huge difference in the quality of the transcription outcome that you receive. Accents can present a challenge. Meaning can be lost, words completely misheard, colloquialisms misunderstood— all of which is detrimental to an accurate transcript.
In order to receive accurate transcripts which take UK English into account, enlisting a UK-based partner or one which uses AI-based transcription that is trained on UK English, such as Verbit’s and Take Note’s, is essential. You want to ensure either the automatic speech recognition (ASR) being used by your transcription partner or the transcribers they’re assigning to work on your projects (if you request human transcribers) can detect nuances and accents. There is a much higher chance that the transcript will be less accurate or won’t resonate with your UK-based audience if the company you’re using doesn’t specialize in UK transcription.
We’ve seen that transcripts that accurately reflect the regional dialects and UK word spellings go a long way in expanding your business’s accessibility to UK individuals. However, transcript providers like Verbit can also be enlisted to help you reach larger global audiences as well.
Translating your transcripts to reach greater international audiences
When considering accessibility and all of the use cases for business transcription, translation is another element to consider. If you’re already having transcripts generated for your content, why not also have them translated using multilingual transcription services to make that content accessible to greater audiences around the world as well?
Companies like Verbit can help business professionals using them for transcription to translate their videos for audiences and employees who speak different languages. If your goal is to engage and grow audiences, translation of transcripts offers an effective way to reach global participants and expand your footprint.
Transcription partners like Verbit and Take Note can offer not only highly accurate audio transcription solutions, but translation using professional human translators to support your global efforts and improve accessibility for your business’s global audience.
How much does transcription cost in the UK?
Factors like the length and amount of Zoom calls and video recordings which need to be transcribed, can all play a part in determining price points for business transcription. The required turnaround time on transcription files can also affect the pricing.
A partner like Verbit and its UK-based company, Take Note, are able to work with each business to determine its needs and come up with a solution which meets the budget allocated toward securing transcriptions. Contact us to learn how you can partner with Verbit and Take Note to start implementing its easy-to-use business and accessibility solutions, plus audio description, real-time transcription and closed captioning to benefit additional audiences too.