The transcripts exist so the show can be read rather than heard. That is worth little if the pages around them are hard to get through, so the same care goes into the site itself.
Structure a screen reader can move through. One heading per page that names it, headings in order with no levels skipped, real landmarks, a named navigation region, and a skip link straight to the content. Checked on every build — a failure stops the build rather than shipping.
Images say something useful. Where the show has told us what is in an episode's photo, that becomes the alt text: "Ali and Lynne at Oaklands College parkrun" rather than "Artwork for episode 457". Episodes with no cover of their own say exactly that, instead of pretending.
Timestamps announce what they do. Each one reads as "Listen from 18 minutes 2 seconds", not as a bare number — and the label is only added when the player is actually working, so nothing promises a jump it cannot make.
Colour contrast is measured, not assumed. The apricot accent is the show's colour, and as body-text links on the pale background it measured 1.93:1 — about a quarter of the standard. It is now a darkened apricot that passes on all three backgrounds the site uses. The palette did not change; only text did.
Light, dark, or follow your system, with the choice remembered, and animation reduced to nothing if your system asks for that.
Keyboard throughout. Visible focus on everything focusable, a native audio player your browser and screen reader already know how to drive, and no control that has to be hovered to be used.
It works with JavaScript off. Search is the only thing that needs it, and it says so rather than presenting a box that does nothing.
Pages reflow rather than scrolling sideways when text is enlarged, and the wide things — tables, transcripts — scroll within themselves instead of pushing the page out of shape.
Every transcript is built to be read instead of the audio, not alongside it. That means saying what the audio contained, not only what the words were.
Sound is described, not left out. 3,344 tags across 404 episodes mark laughter, music, applause, crosstalk and sound effects where they happen — 298 pieces of music and 231 bursts of laughter. For 129 episodes these come from a classifier that listened to the audio; for the rest an editing pass inferred them from what the hosts say, and the transcript never claims otherwise.
Missing audio is admitted. Where speech recognition returned nothing for more than twelve seconds — almost always someone speaking a language it decoded as silence — the transcript says so and gives the length. 92 minutes across 222 episodes. A marker deliberately unlike a sound tag: "[applause]" describes what was heard, this admits something was said and we do not have it. Episode 449 is why, where fifteen seconds of German simply vanished.
Non-English speech is translated, 313 passages so far, with the original kept.
Timestamps move the audio. Press any time in a transcript and the player jumps there, so the two stay in step for anyone using both.
Every episode page states its own status — Transcript, Enhanced or Verified — rather than leaving you to guess how much has been checked.
The page itself is built to the same standard. One h1 per page, real landmarks and heading order, a skip link, lang set, alt text on every image, a native audio player a screen reader and a keyboard already know how to drive, visible focus, colour contrast checked, animation respecting reduce motion, and full function with JavaScript off. Those are not aspirations: they are checked on every build, and a failure stops the build rather than shipping.
If something here does not work with your screen reader, magnifier or keyboard, that is a bug worth reporting — use the feedback form or email log@5kadventures.net.
Transcript, Enhanced, Verified — and why you will still find mistakes
Every episode carries a label saying how far its transcript has been taken. The three mean quite different things, and the difference is worth knowing before you rely on one.
Transcript — the words as speech recognition heard them. Accurate more often than not, but speakers are numbered rather than named and nothing has been looked at.
Enhanced transcript — an automated editing pass has named the speakers, marked the segments, described laughter, music and crosstalk, and corrected misheard names against the roster and the parkrun event list. A large improvement. No person has read it.
Verified — someone has listened to the audio and confirmed the names, the spellings and the segment headings. This is the only label that means a human checked.
Right now every episode is Enhanced and none is Verified. We would rather say that plainly than let a label imply a check nobody has done.
So please expect errors. Speech recognition mishears names constantly — a parkrun becomes a place that does not exist, two people talking over each other become one, an unfamiliar surname becomes three different spellings in the same episode. The editing pass fixes a great many of these and cannot fix them all, and it occasionally introduces one of its own by being confident about the wrong thing.
If you spot something wrong, please tell us. A misheard name, a speaker attributed to the wrong person, a roving report filed under the wrong parkrun, anything that reads as nonsense. Corrections are applied at the source and carried into future episodes, so a name you fix once stops being wrong everywhere — including in episodes not yet edited. That is genuinely how this gets better.
The last of the back catalogue has been through the editing pass. All 457 episodes — 456 released plus the "Episode 59:59" bonus — now have an enhanced transcript with speakers named, segments marked and laughter, music and crosstalk described. No automatic transcripts remain.
Episode 113 has none, and never will: it was never released.
What that changes for a reader: a search now reaches every word the show has broadcast since January 2016, and the people and events indexes describe the whole run rather than the parts that happened to be processed.
Event pages for parkruns in South Africa, Namibia and Eswatini now carry the event's own Facebook page, and its own X account where it has one — 285 links across 227 events.
Only accounts belonging to the event itself are shown.
The rest of the world follows once the links are available.
Legs Eleven, with roving reports from Mandeville, Richmond Olympic, Irchester Country and Spanish Banks Beach — online within a few hours of release, with a full transcript.
Ten years of the parkrun Adventurers podcast, written down and made searchable.
The show has been going since January 2016 and there are hundreds of hours of it. All of that sits inside audio files: who reported from which parkrun, who was interviewed and about what, when a segment first appeared, the name of the volunteer at an event on the other side of the world. None of it could be looked up. You either remembered the episode or you did not.
So this is what the Log is for:
Read an episode instead of listening to it. Every released episode has a transcript with the speakers named and the segments marked. For anyone deaf or hard of hearing that is the difference between the show being available and not.
Find a moment again. Search runs across every transcript, person, event and segment at once. Press a timestamp and the audio jumps there.
Follow a person or a parkrun. Each roving reporter has a page listing everywhere they have reported from; each event has a page listing every report filed from it.
It is beta, and the label is meant literally. The back catalogue is still being worked through, so some episodes have a full transcript and others still have the raw automatic one — each page says which. Names will be wrong in places. Search will occasionally surprise you. Every episode page tells you honestly how much has been checked rather than presenting everything as finished.
Corrections are the most useful thing you can send. They are applied at the source, so a name fixed once stops being wrong everywhere, including in episodes not yet processed. Tell us what is wrong.
An independent project by listeners, not affiliated with or endorsed by parkrun.
