Happy Friday! We made it. Today's Media Roundup is brought to you by Chris.

An avenue to other worlds: Auditorial, a new idea for accessible storytelling — amp.theguardian.com

Too often accessibility is left in the dust in digital. Remember the train companies making their booking pages black and white to mark the passing of Prince Phillip - which just so happened to lock colourblind people out of the sites. To mark World Accessibility Awareness Day, the Guardian in collaboration with Google and the Royal National Institute of Blind People are experimenting with a way to enable blind audiences to consume its content:

"The Auditorial platform uses an assortment of accessibility features and tools to tell the story, including multimodal films with video and audio speed control, high contrast, text-only mode, and scale and focus controls. Users can press play to start the story and adjust the audio, visual and written settings as they are taken through the story."

We've seen examples of magazines and newspapers making their articles audio-enabled, though for the most part that's been done in service of reaching podcast audiences by turning articles into audio. We'd love to see more experiments like the Guardian's, one that puts accessibility first.

CEO Zillah Byng-Thorne on the rise and rise of Future as mag giant defies Covid to more than double profits — www.pressgazette.co.uk

Future plc's done very well over the past year. There's a reason Esther selected them as her big pandemic winner in this week's episode. In this interview with Press Gazette its CEO explains the philosophy behind what has been a rapid and radical transformation.

3 ways in which AI can provide value to any publisher — www.twipemobile.com

Everyone and their dogs are investing in AI. The tech underpins so much of publishers' strategy around everything from content creation to subscriptions. Despite that there is a presumption that only larger publishers can take advantage of it - which Twipe attempts to disabuse us of in this article.

Bloomberg Media, iHeartMedia partner on podcasts — www.mediapost.com

Here's a nice little case study in positive feedback loops. After investing in podcast tech and promotion, Bloomberg Media saw a 26% increase in listens over the course of last year. Now, to grow that still further, it's partnering with iHeartMedia to supercharge that effort.

This week's episode:

Media Voices Special: Which publishers won the pandemic? — voices.media

In this special episode, the Media Voices team take a look at which media companies and personalities have been the biggest winners and losers of the lockdown-era.

Support us with virtual coffee — ko-fi.com

A few nights ago I had a proper anxiety dream about hosting April's Publisher Podcast Awards. An alligator man had ripped the leads out of my laptop, and the live audience (we were in an auditorium) got restless and rowdy as I sprinted around in the dark trying to set up an alternative solution. Esther's also had stress dreams about it. So if you want to buy us some coffee to help alleviate those nightmares, please do pop over to our Ko-Fi page.