Clickable chapters and links to the second: navigating an audio article
A long article read aloud is intimidating: you cannot see where it goes, or find the part you want. Chapters and a timestamped link fix both, without adding anything to the text.
A feature article runs ten minutes as audio, sometimes fifteen. That is long. Faced with a flat progress bar, the listener has no idea what is coming, or where the part they care about sits. And if they want to point a colleague to the right moment, the best they can say is "somewhere in the middle." Two features remove both frictions: clickable chapters and a link that starts at the exact second. This article explains what they actually do, what they ask of your article, and what they do not do.
Subheadings become chapters, with no markup
The first idea is simple: your article already has a structure. Its subheadings (your "##" in Markdown, your heading tags in HTML) split the text into sections. WeDispatch spots those subheadings and drops clickable markers onto the player bar, at the moment each section begins in the audio. You add no markup and no time codes by hand: the split follows the text you wrote.
For the listener, the effect is immediate. The bar stops being a smooth line and becomes a map: they see how many chapters make up the article, they jump to the one they want in a click, they see where they are, they go back if they lost the thread. Long-form becomes comfortable again, because it can be scanned instead of endured. It is the same logic as the table of contents on a written article, carried over to the ear.
There is an editorial consequence worth knowing: the quality of the chapters depends on the quality of your subheadings. An article organised in clear sections produces useful chapters. An article written as a single block, with no subheadings, produces audio with no markers, because there is nothing to mark. That is not a limit of the tool, it is a helpful reminder: what helps the reader's eye helps the listener's ear. If you are unsure which player template suits your articles, our overview of the ten player templates spells out which ones show chapters and which fall back to a plain bar.
The link that starts at the right second
The second feature answers a sharing need. You are listening to an article, a sentence strikes you at two minutes thirteen, and you want to send it to someone at exactly that spot. You add ?wd_t=133 to the article's address, and the player starts playback at 2:13. The number is a plain count of seconds, which keeps the link readable and easy to build by hand if you need to.
That small parameter changes how audio content travels. A quote becomes shareable at the exact moment it is spoken, not "somewhere in the article." A newsroom can send readers straight to an interviewee's answer. A training team can point to a precise passage of a long document. It is the audio version of an anchor in a web page: instead of jumping to a paragraph, you jump to a second. This logic of locating a point in time is the same one that lets you find the moment a word is spoken in an article, and it rests on the word-level timestamps we produce at generation.
The full detail of both mechanisms, including how they appear on the player, is described on the chapters and link-to-the-second feature page.
What it is not
It helps to be clear about the limits, because a well described feature is judged as much on what it declines to promise. Chapters do not rewrite your article and do not invent a structure where there is none: they mirror your subheadings, no more and no less. The timestamped link does not create a standalone downloadable clip; it opens the article and starts playback at the right place, the article stays the container. And the alignment is done on the audio as it was generated: if you correct the text and regenerate the audio, the markers are recalculated on the new version, they do not point to an old cut.
None of this needs an account or server-side setup: the structure comes from the text, the timing comes from generation. To see how the player, and therefore the chapters, slot into a site without touching the theme, our WordPress page describes the shortest path, the plugin, and the alternatives by API or feed for other platforms.
What to take away
A long audio article does not have to be an opaque block. Chapters turn the progress bar into a map the listener scans, and the link-to-the-second turns content you listen to passively into content you quote, share, and point to at the right moment. Neither feature asks for extra work when the article is well structured: they reward, at the ear, the care you already put into your subheadings. It is the kind of feature you do not notice until you use it, and miss badly once you have.
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