Musements: My Kingdom for RSS and Atom.

Hi, everyone!
I was pondering one morning, as I do, lamenting the lack of a written news app without paying $5.99. While others tune in to our Podcasts app and listen for free to things like ABC Nightline, CBS Evening News, or even the PBS News Hour amongst the dwindling selections of auditory info, I, among others with hearing disabilities, am left out of the loop.

I do try listening to the podcasts with the so-called ADA headphones I was issued, but as you might surmise, not all audio quality is equal, not all voices sound the same, not all people enunciate uniformly. Six different people all saying "The mean bean is keen in a dietary regime" will not sound the same.

What fixes that problem?
Transcripts.
What do we not get?
Transcripts.

Allow me to reintroduce myself.

My name is RSS.
News and entertainment are still delivered via RSS through various sites.
Text can be embedded in a feed, along with linked images, videos, and audio.
Podcasts, after all, are just RSS feeds with audio and/or video instead of text as the primary content.

So I ponder:
What stops Securus and/or the Floriderp Department of Contusio Florida Department of Corrections from offering a disability-friendly offering of news and entertainment?

Laziness Nothing, when you look at it.

Take an RSS reader that's open source, like Feeder, for example.
Review its code, shore up or strip out features you don't want inmates to access from a security standpoint

• Yes, there's a good reason for checking and doing this. If someone that we are ordered to have no contact with posts, say, a public feed of their life through their camera on a site like... Flickr (they still exist, right?), being able to add their feed to our reader technically is a form of stalking, and I'll not have a creep ruining my accessibility need, thank you.
• Likewise, I'm sure there are some adult entertainment feeds in existence. I don't need to hear grown males shouting that they got some hot porn for a soup. Ugh.

...and once you're happy with the base features, put together a feed of a couple hundred things.
If you're trying to limit outside access, you pull the feeds to your own server behind the great concertina wires, serving from that ingest point, and maybe cache the last 100, or 250 items so we can sit and self-educate peacefully.
Give us a mixture of news sources to satisfy the squawks of "Oh, they're biased!". Give us entertainment feeds. Give us educational feeds for maths, the sciences, and so on.

More important to me is the economization of data transmission to each tablet.
Let me pick on a podcast we have access to, called Daily Tech News Show, starring Tom Merritt, Sarah Lane, and their show's producer, Roger Chang.
Their daily show has episodes that are roughly 30 minutes in length, and are 15-20 MB each. To get the brief amount of tech news I am offered there, that is 75-100 MB of data used; multiply by 4.3, puts me at 322.5 to 430 MB of data used per month on a single podcast if I listened diligently.
If I had access to transcriptions of the same show, which I believe exist, my individual data use would drop over 95%, even if they included a few photos of items that were being talked about! Wow!

I picked on DTNS, because they are likely to be a podcast that you all might be familiar with, and because their episodes are pretty consistently sized.

We have podcasts with frequent episodes that are 100+ MB. Imagine the savings there for people who just want to read the transcription... :)

I'm not advocating taking away the audio podcasts. Oh, no, don't do that -- my neighbor is visually impaired, so audio options benefit him!
I'm asking for text-based options to be provided for those whose hearing makes listening a chore, at a similar level of offering as the audio and video options (that is, more than one source of information), and at a similar cost (where their cost is $0/year, mine is ~$72, if I get Newsstand every month).

I'm tired of asking my people to pay the $6 tax to get access to a poorly maintained news feed, just to accommodate my hearing impairment.

You should be tired, too. :)