Making Webcasts Accessible to the Deaf

I’ve largely ignored webcasting and podcasting — just learning enough to understand what’s going on and staying up to speed with online technologies. But beyond that, it’s a waste of my time. I had thought about downloading podcasts and using them to practice listening, but I have enough material thanks to the speech therapist.
Besides, there are so many choices (The Paradox of Choice : Why More Is Less), so which would be useful for practice? Homemade podcasts may not be clear enough for me or it depends on the speaker. The books on tape and radio industries don’t just hire anyone — the voice matters.
Making Webcasts accessible to the deaf uncovers what happens to me a few times a week. I receive a link to a humorous resource only to find out it’s a video or audio that can’t be understood without understanding the text. The CaptionMeNow sounds like a great concept. It’ll take a while before sites adopt it and it’s an imperfect technology as speech recognition has a lot of growing up to do.