How to make sermon content more accessible

Preaching today is as simple as it was hundreds of years ago -- pray, study, proclaim. 

Distribution, however is radically different. Today, a sermon can reach much deeper into a community, and this starts with Accessibility, where a church leverages transcription, closed captions, and foreign language translation, including American Sign Language. If you imagine your sermon as an orange, using these tools will help get a lot more value than just one squeeze at the pulpit on Sunday morning.

Accessibility 101 - post your sermon online

Get a website. Website design has come a long way since the internet popularly debuted in the 1990s; today, webdesign platforms like Wordpress, Weebly, Squarespace and similar tools make web design almost as easy as creating a Microsoft Word document. (Operative word: almost.) Now, this does not mean that making a web site easy, just like know how to use Microsoft Word does not make one a great writer.​
Digitize your sermons. Have a box full of sermons on old cassettes or older media? If you digitize your cassettes -- convert your cassette into an audio file that can be transferred from your computer to the internet, and then to other computers around the world -- you can bless more people with a greater ministry impact.
Upload your sermons to a podcast platform. Upload your sermons to podcast platforms like iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play, and more for greater reach and impact around the world. 

Accessibility 201 - transcribe your sermon

Transcribe your sermon
Transcribe your sermon. Why? By transcribing your sermon and posting that transcription on your website, the terms used in your sermon -- like "grace", "forgiveness", "mercy" and so forth can now be found by internet search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo, and more. These engines cannot search an audio file and determine what you've preached. There are people in your community right now, even as you read this, who are searching with phrases like, "forgiveness from adultery" and "addiction recovery." If your sermon has used these terms and your transcribed sermon is posted at your website, internet searchers can find you. Transcription makes your sermon accessible and searchable by outsiders, fellow staff members, and congregation members.

Accessibility 301

Close caption your sermon
If your sermons are available on video, like on a platform such as YouTube or Vimeo, close caption your video.
Closed captions are the first step in reaching the disabled, like the blind; deaf; hard-of-hearing veterans, factory workers and elderly; and people learning English as a second language.
  • Captions are popular with the Hearing, not just the deaf. 82% of Netflix viewers watch all or most programming with captions on. For everybody, captions are essential for viewing content in noisy areas like restaurants, airports, urban areas, poor weather and areas where silence is required like libraries, workplaces, schools, and more.
  • Captions make your sermons indexed in Google, Bing and other online providers. If Google or Bing can't find your sermon, your sermon can't be found.

Accessibility 401

Translate your sermon
While you do not have to translate your sermon into all of the world's 6,909 distinct languages, what translations do make sense for your ministry to your target community?  Spanish? French? German? Burmese? Vietnamese?