> How many people actually stick to the page and listen to that?
I just did. 3 minutes wasn't that bad and I wasn't somewhere where it would be a problem.
> Why do sites do this?
NPR is a radio network. I have seen that often they do transcribe their clips. I am not sure what the process they have for that looks like, but it seems this particular clip didn't get transcribed.
Edit: looks like they do have a transcription mentioned elsewhere in the thread. So seems like some kind of UI fail.
NPR does transcribe (many, most?) its audio stories, but usually there's a delay of a day or so – the published timestamp for this story is 5:06AM (ET) today.
edit: looks like there's a text version of the article. I'm assuming this is a CMS issue: there's an audio story and a "print story", but the former hadn't been linked to the latter: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23628790
NPR is fantastic when it comes to accessibility by providing transcripts. I linked the page thinking the transcript will come later as they usually do. But turns out it was a wrong link. See elsewhere for the correct link.
More than zero. It's called closed captioning, isn't it? I've quite often seen closed-captioning that put brief written descriptions of non-verbal depictions in bracket, and it's not entirely common either
Sorry, I thought that since we were originally talking about transcriptions of radio news broadcasts and accessibility for the hard of hearing that closed-captioning would be appropriate and relevant. But your point is well met.
Most people are going to hear the story on the radio or in a podcast app / RSS feed. It’s useful to have the story indexed on a shareable web link where it can be played on different platforms without any setup. If I wanted to share a podcast episode with friends in a group chat, a link like this would be a good way to do it. Since this is more of a long-form text discussion forum I’d probably look for a text format before posting here.
And here's a 1st-person account from the arrested man: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/06/24/i-was-wro...