Make Your WordPress Blog Accessible with Audio

A WordPress plugin that instantly turns your blogposts into audio podcasts.

Originally published on Play.ht

One of the most important things you can do to your content is making sure it is as accessible as possible…

What that means is, when users land on one of your blog posts, they are all going to be in different situations, some might be commuting, some walking, some at work, designing, etc.

This article will show you how to convert your blog posts to audio using the Play.ht WordPress plugin and make them available to your users as Podcasts.

Step 1 — Download and Install the Play.ht WordPress plugin

The first thing you need to do is download and activate the Play.ht plugin for WordPress.

You can either search for Play.ht on the plugin store or simply download a zip file from here.

Dashboard > Plugins > Add New

Click the ‘Upload Plugin’ button on the top of the page and you will see a pop up to upload the plugin from your computer. Click ‘Choose File’ and select the plugin that you downloaded in step 1 from where you downloaded it on your computer and click ‘Install Now’.

Upload Plugin > Choose File

Once the plugin has been uploaded and installed by WordPress, you will see a message as shown in the screenshot below. The last step is activating the plugin. Simply click on ‘Activate Plugin’ to activate it.

Install > Activate Plugin

Step 2 — Create a Free Account

After you have activated the plugin, you need to Sign up to receive the free credits that you will use to convert articles to audio and try the product.

You will receive 3 free credits, and each credit allows you to convert one article to audio.

Step 3 — Convert your Blogpost into an Audio Podcast

Now that you have signed and up received the free credits, it’s time to convert some of your articles to audio!

i. Converting from All Posts page

Navigate to your ‘All Posts’ section and you should now see ‘Language and Voice’ dropdowns at the top of the page.

This is where you can select the language and voice for your audio.

You can preview how the voice sounds like by clicking the green play button next to the voice.

Play.ht supports over 18 languages with more than 150 voices!

ii. Converting a single blogpost

Once you have settled on a voice, select the post you want to add audio to and click the Convert to Audio button. You will see a popup with a progress bar.

Converting an article to audio depends on the length of the article and usually takes around 5–10 mins.

* Note: Knowing which articles have audio

Once the article is converted, you will see a speaker icon next to the article in the posts page telling you that the article is now listenable.

iii. Convert multiple articles to audio

Of course, selecting posts one by one to add audio is a time-consuming process so we built a bulk ‘add audio’ feature where you can select multiple posts at once, select the voice you want and click the Conver to Audio button.

The selected posts will be processed and converted to audio one by one saving you time. You don’t have to wait for them, you can close the admin if you want.

When the audio is ready Play.ht will automatically add an Audio Player at the top of the post and make the audio available to users for listening.

iv. Converting from the Editor page

You can also add audio to a post from the Editor page from the Play.ht controls on the right side of the page.

Supported Languages and Voices

Play.ht supports over 18 languages and more than 150 voices!

These are some of the languages Play.ht supports:

English

German

Spanish

French

Italian

Japanese

Korean

Portuguese

Turkish

Russian

Updating audio when the blog post is updated

If you edit the text of a post that already has audio, then you can reflect those changes in audio by simply converting it to audio, again.

Since you are most likely to be in the editor page when you are making edits to the post, you can use the Play.ht controls from the right-hand side from this page to update the audio.

Please note that updating an audio costs a credit.

Changing the Audio Player’s position

By default. Play.ht positions the Audio Player at the beginning of the article but you can place it wherever you like using the Audio Player’s Short Code.

Here’s how to do it.

Go to the Editor page of the post. Look for the Add Audio button in the Editor and click on it. Cut the generated Short Code and paste it wherever you like.

Customizing the Audio Player

There’s a lot of things you can customize in the audio player to change the look and feel of it and match it according to your theme’s design.

And there are many things you can change to enable or disable certain functionality.

Some of the important things you might want to configure are:

Changing the color Remove Play.ht branding Add your own branding Enable email subscriptions

Analytics of your audio articles

Play.ht provides you with a comprehensive report of how many users are listening to your articles.

You will be able to see:

Listens — The number of people listening to your articles. You can also filter the data per article to see if some articles are being listened more than others. Downloads — The number of times your articles are being downloaded as audio files. Shares — The number of times your articles are shared on Facebook or Twitter as audio.

Reaching out for help and support

We are always available for any help you need! Just send us a message on the chat from the Play.ht dashboard or email us at support@play.ht.

Found Play useful? Please give us an upvote on Product Hunt here! Thank you so much for the support!

Want Play for your Medium Blog? Check out The Play Chrome Extension here.