Introduction

Media has the power to transform your classroom by supplementing course materials, sparking discussions, and explaining complex concepts. Videos and audio can make learning more interactive and dynamic while giving you reusable content for future semesters. This guide will help you create videos and audio that work for everyone in your classroom. You’ll learn practical strategies to make your media more inclusive and discover why accessible design benefits all your students, not just those with specific needs.

Principles for Effective Media

Richard Mayer’s multimedia learning theory includes 12 principles that guide effective instructional design. The four principles that are particularly important for creating accessible and effective course media: coherence, signaling, redundancy, and segmenting. These principles will help you create videos and audio that support student learning while reducing cognitive overload.

Keep it simple (Coherence): Remove unnecessary information that doesn’t support your learning objectives. Extra stories or decorative elements can distract from your main message (Fiorella, 2021). Review The Coherence Principle video (length 2:34)

Highlight what matters (Signaling): Point to important information, circle key concepts, or use your voice to emphasize critical points. Your gestures and vocal changes help direct student attention. Check out The Signaling Principle video (length 3:48):

Avoid redundancy: Generally, spoken explanations work better than on-screen text with images and narration. Overloading the screen with redundant information can cause cognitive overload (Fiorella, 2021). See the Redundancy video from Wisc-Online (length 2:58):

Break it into chunks (Segmenting): Shorter segments work better than long continuous content. Consider splitting a 60-minute lesson into three 20-minute parts with brief pauses between sections (Knott, 2020). Look at The Segmenting Principle video (length 3:39)

Learning Outcome

By the end of this module, you will be able to:

  • Create inclusive video and audio content that enhances the learning experience for all students.
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Accessibility Essentials

“Accessibility features are also used by people without disabilities in a variety of situations.”
(Web Accessibility Initiative, n.d.)

Understanding Educational Media

Educational media includes any videos or audio you use for teaching. This could be a lecture recording, an instructional video, or a podcast episode. When designed thoughtfully, these resources can supplement your course materials, promote discussion, provide real-life examples, and free up valuable class time.

The key is keeping things simple and focused. Students learn best when they can control their experience: pausing to take notes, rewinding difficult sections, or reviewing content multiple times. Videos are particularly effective for learning medical procedures, math equations, and counselling techniques because students can rewatch content as many times as needed to fully grasp the concepts being taught (Noetel et al., 2021).

What Makes Media Accessible?

Accessible media is designed so everyone can use it, regardless of their abilities or circumstances. This includes:

  • Captions for videos
  • Transcripts for audio content
  • Clear audio quality
  • Simple, direct language
  • Good color contrast in visual elements

The goal is ensuring equal access to your educational content. When you design with accessibility in mind from the start, you create better experiences for everyone. Captions and transcripts are recognized as Universal Design for Learning (UDL) and inclusive design because you are composing in multiple media, speech and text, and designing for adaptability and inclusivity (UDL, 2022; The Inclusive Design Guide, n.d.).

Listen to Brenna discuss her first foray into podcasting and how her audio lectures inadvertently made her class more inclusive and accessible (length 1:50). 

Before we start, I want to say that my thinking today is informed by lots of people, but most recently, maybe the easiest threads to link my thinking back to would be Ben Mitchell’s TPC talk last week about accommodations and accessibility, particularly for neurodivergent students, and an article I was reading this morning in the Journal of Multimodal Rhetorics called Universal Design in Apocalypse Time: A Short History of Accessible Teaching Excavation by Sarah Madoka Currie. I’ll link that in the show notes.

In both cases, these thinkers are giving me a reason to think a little bit more, a little bit more critically, maybe just to think a little differently about how accessibility and accommodation function. The broad brush strokes difference between the two ideas: Accommodations are things that we do to our course in order to allow specific learners to have needs met. It might be, you’ve all seen the letters you get from Accessibility Services. It might be extra time on an exam. It might be the ability to type instead of handwrite an exam, whatever it is. It’s an accommodation, when it’s granted, to one or a small handful of students within the course, but everybody else is doing the sort of like, quote, unquote, mainstream assessment.

Accessibility is a lot broader. Accessibility is like trying to anticipate the potential needs of our learners and meet them, without having to give special accommodations to individual students, and without those individual students having to request it. It’s trying to imagine like, “Where are the barriers to learning in my class and how can I manage those ahead of time? How can I think about access at the course design stage?” It might be that you don’t have timed exams at all, so individual students who require additional time on the exam don’t need to be accommodated in your class because that’s not a particular issue of your course.

That’s, in broad brushstroke, the difference between accommodation and accessibility. We tend to think of them in the same breath, often, but they’re actually really, really different. The main difference, I think, is that the university, and I don’t mean our university, I mean the university as a structure. The university is really good at accommodation because that’s like a legal framework. I can already hear friends arguing with me about the really good at accommodation part. I totally get it. Accommodations are often difficult to access for students. There’s all kinds of problems around the requirements for documentation. I guess what I mean by really good is that there’s an existing framework and a process for accommodation.

We often talk about the institution being accessible when what we mean is that the institution grants accommodations. The problem with an accommodation framework, whether it’s for disability, whether it’s for remote learners, whether it’s for, well, any kind of reason that students might have exceptionalities or atypicalities that create different needs for them in the classroom, the accommodation model, A, requires students to self-identify the institution, but it also requires documentation. Documentation can be really, really, really expensive. Especially in the case of a learning disability or a neurodivergence that isn’t diagnosed in childhood, getting that diagnosis in adulthood can be really, really expensive.

Then there’s also familial and cultural reasons why someone might not have had access to that kind of care, or might not want to access that kind of care. Now, the problem with accommodations is that they’re, by definition, exclusive to students who know how to access them, and they don’t necessarily cover all the kinds of needs that we might see. Accessibility is something different, broader, larger. It’s more like an ethos, more like a way of approaching your course content from the perspective of wanting the most number of people to have the best possible experience.

I get uncomfortable sometimes when I hear conversations about accessibility that seem to place accessibility up against rigor or difficulty. I don’t think … Well, I don’t really care about rigor as a concept to start out with, but I also don’t think there’s any reason to believe that a place where everyone feels a sense of belonging and can access the materials, I don’t think that those things get in the way of whatever notion of rigor that you hold, unless the idea of rigor is just that fewer people can access it.

It’s not a sign of rigor if course materials are not in an accessible format or can’t be read by a screen reader. That’s not rigor. That’s just exclusion. I guess, the reason why I’m thinking about this is because I want us all to think more about accessibility and less about accommodation, which isn’t to say that I don’t want students who need accommodations to have them granted. Of course, I do. As we work towards a more accessible institution, that’s going to happen faster, slower with greater and lesser sense of willing in different areas of the institution. I’m not arguing for the dismantling of the accommodation system, though I would read a persuasive argument about it.

What I am suggesting is that if you’ve thought about access beginning and ending with the act of accommodation, I’m warmly inviting you to think a little bit broader about what it means to allow accessibility for your course to your learners.

Please know that you do not have to make all your own videos and audio files! Listen to Jon discuss when to create your own course media and when to use someone else’s! 

So here are some thoughts on using your own created videos rather than outsourcing from a third party. Obviously, there are some topics that have thousands of videos explaining them, so why would you take the time to recreate a video on such a well-known topic? One reason is to make it relevant to your specific course. There may be only a portion of that topic you wish to explain to your students, and after wading through hundreds of videos, you may realize that the other videos out there over explain some parts of what you want, and maybe under explain others.

Another reason is regionality. If you can anchor your video in your locality, it can help the students engage with the material better and possibly make the material feel more relevant to their situation. This is one reason we often deal with subject matter experts in our region for content instead of sourcing basically the same material from video producers far away.

When developing ideas for course content to be used online, I often ask the instructor or developer to think back to areas of the course where they have seen consistent issues with students not understanding the material as fully as they should. While revising the visual arts course, the instructor realized that a few topics weren’t having the same impact on students, so he devised a series of short videos to fill in these blanks. For instance, one was a short video on how to view a subject from behind a canvas and how to use distance, scale and pencil placement to help the drawing process. We made a short video explaining those processes and the students were able to understand that material much easier and fill in that kind of blank.

I’m also often asked to create video productions that I push back against. Often the idea of the video can be easily summarized in a few understandable sentences, so it’s important that you think through why you actually need to make a video in the first place. The best use of videos are for demonstration purposes, relatability with subject matter experts or really good explanations of things. Things that you can really focus on.

Check Your Understanding

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Why Accessibility?

“Inclusive design acknowledges the essential nature of accessibility and proactively seeks to provide user-friendly experiences for people with and without disabilities.”
(Phillips & Colton, 2021)

Think about curb cuts on sidewalks. Originally designed for wheelchair users, they now help parents with strollers, delivery workers, and anyone with mobility challenges. Accessible design benefits everyone, not just people with disabilities.

The same principle applies to course media. Captions help students who are deaf or hard of hearing, but they also help anyone studying in a noisy environment or whose first language isn’t English. Transcripts allow students to search for specific information or study without sound.

Listen to Jamie’s story about her struggles in the classroom and her first experience with captions (length 5:42)!

First, I want to share a little bit about myself, so you understand why my first experience with captions is such a big deal to me.

At six years old, I lost 98% of my hearing in my right ear and about 10% in my left ear. When this happened, I was moved from my desk near my friends to the front of the classroom, and I remember hating it. I remember all throughout elementary school my mom would inform my teachers that I was hard of hearing, and I would instantly be moved to the from my desk near my friends to the front of the classroom and every time that happened, I was embarrassed and humiliated, I was often teased for having to sit at the front of the class. But back then I was not able to tell anyone what I was feeling probably because I was young and did not how to put those feelings into words, but I could, and I did put my feelings into actions.

What actions did I take well I simply remained a sick kid, I never wanted to go to school so often I would tell my mom that my ears hurt, and she would keep me home those days. If she took me to the doctor, I would be diagnosed with an ear infection and that would get me a few more days off school. Funny thing though I can remember being surprised that I actually had an ear infection because hurting ears were just an excuse to get out of school. If I did go to school, then often I would tell the teacher I was sick so they would let me call my mom to come pick me up. One time in grade 4 my teacher told me I could not call my mom and go home; she said I had to stay at school. I remember being upset but I turned around and went back to my desk then I threw up on it then she let me go home. The odd thing is I don’t remember actually being sick until I was told I could not go home.

Now things actually became worse in high school. I went from a class of about 15 students with mixed grades and a whole school population of about 60 students to a school with hundreds of students and each classroom was very full. In high school I remember walking out of the classrooms into the hallways which were packed with yelling teenagers, my heart would race, I would become clammy, and I would leave. I will say I think I was pretty good about leaving, I would call my mom from the payphone, yes, a payphone, and tell her what I was doing before I left, then I would sign out at the office with some odd excuse. Most often I would pop a brace off one of my teeth and say I was going to the orthodontist to have it glued back on and I actually went to the orthodontist and had it glued back on.

Every day when I came home from high school, I would beg my parents to let me quit and eventually much to my parents dismay I got a full-time job and dropped out. Back then, I think, anxiety, disability, accessibility just was not recognized, and I hope if I were a child and teenager now it would be much different.

I will say things were much better when I returned to school as an adult, harder because by then I had 3 girls aged 12, 11, and 8, better because I was an adult and could properly stifle my anxiety. I think here it is important to say that it took until I was 35 years old to have the confidence to state my needs in the classroom and even at that I have only ever done it once. Then and now it is embarrassing to speak of my hearing impairment and right now even though I am sitting here alone I can feel that my face is red because it is hot.

My takeaway from my experience is don’t wait for students to come forward with their accessibility needs instead try to design classroom experiences the best you can to meet the needs of all students. Even in University teachers have power over students. Many students are not comfortable coming forward to state their needs and rocking the boat. Even worse than that many students cannot afford an official assessment and diagnosis if it is required.

Let’s skip ahead to my first captioned movie, it was the Girl with the dragon tattoo, and I watched the Swedish series. It was amazing I did not miss anything; I should also note that the captions were in English. Honestly though, I was hooked I made Blair watch the rest of the movies in the Swedish series. I kept telling him it was so much better to read the screen and he kept saying that we could turn captions on if we watched the English version, but I was happy and I felt like we were even so to speak so Swedish it was.

This is a little aside but two years ago I was finally able to get hearing aids, technology finally caught up. I will say the learning curve was steep, I sat in my living room with everything shut off and listened to the noises around me. It was crazy, I had no idea the dogs’ nails clicked on the hardwood, it definitely explains the scratches on the floor. I also had no idea how loud cars are when they drive by. And when we were watching TV, I heard someone at the door so I went downstairs to see who it was, a few times, I got up to answer the phone, a few times, until finally my daughter said Mom what are you doing so I told her and we all had a pretty good laugh because it turns out I had never heard those sounds from the TV before. I should also note that I still have captions turned on for all entertainment and instructional videos. I find it a lot easier to fill in the gaps by reading the screen because even with hearing aids it is hard to hear especially when there is background noise.

Inclusive design acknowledges the essential nature of accessibility and proactively seeks to provide user-friendly experiences for people with and without disabilities.

(Phillips & Colton, 2021)

Listen to Brenna Clarke Gray discuss thinking a little differently about how accessibility and accommodation function (length 5:24).

Before we start, I want to say that my thinking today is informed by lots of people, but most recently, maybe the easiest threads to link my thinking back to would be Ben Mitchell’s TPC talk last week about accommodations and accessibility, particularly for neurodivergent students, and an article I was reading this morning in the Journal of Multimodal Rhetorics called Universal Design in Apocalypse Time: A Short History of Accessible Teaching Excavation by Sarah Madoka Currie. I’ll link that in the show notes.

In both cases, these thinkers are giving me a reason to think a little bit more, a little bit more critically, maybe just to think a little differently about how accessibility and accommodation function. The broad brush strokes difference between the two ideas: Accommodations are things that we do to our course in order to allow specific learners to have needs met. It might be, you’ve all seen the letters you get from Accessibility Services. It might be extra time on an exam. It might be the ability to type instead of handwrite an exam, whatever it is. It’s an accommodation, when it’s granted, to one or a small handful of students within the course, but everybody else is doing the sort of like, quote, unquote, mainstream assessment.

Accessibility is a lot broader. Accessibility is like trying to anticipate the potential needs of our learners and meet them, without having to give special accommodations to individual students, and without those individual students having to request it. It’s trying to imagine like, “Where are the barriers to learning in my class and how can I manage those ahead of time? How can I think about access at the course design stage?” It might be that you don’t have timed exams at all, so individual students who require additional time on the exam don’t need to be accommodated in your class because that’s not a particular issue of your course.

That’s, in broad brushstroke, the difference between accommodation and accessibility. We tend to think of them in the same breath, often, but they’re actually really, really different. The main difference, I think, is that the university, and I don’t mean our university, I mean the university as a structure. The university is really good at accommodation because that’s like a legal framework. I can already hear friends arguing with me about the really good at accommodation part. I totally get it. Accommodations are often difficult to access for students. There’s all kinds of problems around the requirements for documentation. I guess what I mean by really good is that there’s an existing framework and a process for accommodation.

We often talk about the institution being accessible when what we mean is that the institution grants accommodations. The problem with an accommodation framework, whether it’s for disability, whether it’s for remote learners, whether it’s for, well, any kind of reason that students might have exceptionalities or atypicalities that create different needs for them in the classroom, the accommodation model, A, requires students to self-identify the institution, but it also requires documentation. Documentation can be really, really, really expensive. Especially in the case of a learning disability or a neurodivergence that isn’t diagnosed in childhood, getting that diagnosis in adulthood can be really, really expensive.

Then there’s also familial and cultural reasons why someone might not have had access to that kind of care, or might not want to access that kind of care. Now, the problem with accommodations is that they’re, by definition, exclusive to students who know how to access them, and they don’t necessarily cover all the kinds of needs that we might see. Accessibility is something different, broader, larger. It’s more like an ethos, more like a way of approaching your course content from the perspective of wanting the most number of people to have the best possible experience.

I get uncomfortable sometimes when I hear conversations about accessibility that seem to place accessibility up against rigor or difficulty. I don’t think … Well, I don’t really care about rigor as a concept to start out with, but I also don’t think there’s any reason to believe that a place where everyone feels a sense of belonging and can access the materials, I don’t think that those things get in the way of whatever notion of rigor that you hold, unless the idea of rigor is just that fewer people can access it.

It’s not a sign of rigor if course materials are not in an accessible format or can’t be read by a screen reader. That’s not rigor. That’s just exclusion. I guess, the reason why I’m thinking about this is because I want us all to think more about accessibility and less about accommodation, which isn’t to say that I don’t want students who need accommodations to have them granted. Of course, I do. As we work towards a more accessible institution, that’s going to happen faster, slower with greater and lesser sense of willing in different areas of the institution. I’m not arguing for the dismantling of the accommodation system, though I would read a persuasive argument about it.

What I am suggesting is that if you’ve thought about access beginning and ending with the act of accommodation, I’m warmly inviting you to think a little bit broader about what it means to allow accessibility for your course to your learners.

Here is a link to the full episode: You Got This! Season 3, Episode 13: A Bit of a Pickle, ft. Emilio Porco.

When students cannot access your content, they miss out on learning opportunities. By designing inclusively, you create a more equitable classroom where all students can succeed.

How Accessible Media Enhances Learning

Accessible videos and audio improve the learning experience in several ways:

Flexible learning: Students can engage with content at their own pace, reviewing difficult concepts as needed. This reduces cognitive load and helps with comprehension (Fiorella, 2021).

Multiple formats: Providing the same information through different channels (visual, auditory, text) helps students with different learning preferences and needs.

Better engagement: When students feel included and can access all course materials, they’re more likely to participate actively in learning. Students can struggle emotionally and cognitively when they don’t feel a sense of belonging in the classroom (Bowen, 2021).

Increased comprehension: Captions and transcripts can improve understanding for all students, not just those who need them for accessibility reasons.

Study support: Transcripts can be downloaded, searched, and reviewed offline, giving students more study options.

Check Your Understanding

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Implementation Guide

“Part of inclusive teaching is acknowledging the uniqueness of students and teaching using a variety of ways such that it reaches a diverse audience.”
(SNOW, 2018)

Getting Started

Focus on good audio quality first—it’s more important than perfect video. Students need to hear you clearly to benefit from your content. Don’t worry about making everything perfect; authentic, relatable content often works better than overly polished productions.

Adding Captions and Transcripts

For Kaltura users: The system generates automatic captions, but you’ll need to edit them for accuracy. Machine-generated captions often contain errors due to background noise, accents, or technical terms.

Learn how to edit and download captions in Kaltura videos.

You will find comprehensive written instructions for editing captions in Kaltura at Accessibility and Enrichment: Editing Captions.

For YouTube: Use the platform’s automatic captioning feature, then review and edit for accuracy. YouTube provides comprehensive instructions for:

For other platforms: Most screen recording software offers captioning options, or you can add captions during the editing process. If you are on a MAC you may choose to use QuickTime and if you are on a Windows computer you can check out iSpring Free Cam. You could also use Loom which works on any device or you could use paid softwares such as Snagit or Camtasia. 

Audio Considerations

If you’re creating audio-only content, always provide a transcript. Consider recording lectures with a simple external microphone connected to your phone, this creates reusable content students can access anytime. For audio editing we recommend Audacity, Audacity is a free, open source software that works on Windows, macOS and many other operating systems.

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Best Practices

“Turns out good content is still effective — we just have to provide it!”
(Knot, 2010)

  1. Test your content with captions on to ensure accuracy
  2. Use clear, simple language in both spoken content and captions
  3. Include diverse representation in your videos when possible
  4. Keep segments short to maintain engagement
  5. Provide context when reusing content across semesters

Moving Forward

Start small by adding captions to one video or creating a transcript for one audio file. As you become more comfortable with these tools, you can apply these practices to more of your content.

Remember that accessibility isn’t just about compliance—it’s about creating inclusive learning environments where all students can thrive. When you design with everyone in mind, you create better educational experiences for your entire class.

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Conclusion

Creating accessible course media is an ongoing practice that gets easier with time. By focusing on clear audio, accurate captions, and thoughtful design principles, you’re building a classroom where every student has the opportunity to succeed. Start with small changes, learn from your students’ experiences, and remember that each step toward accessibility makes your teaching more effective and inclusive for everyone.

Connection to Competencies

The Making Course Videos and Audio Accessible guide supports the B.C. Post-Secondary Digital Literacy Framework (opens in a new tab) by developing educators’ capacity to create and present accessible, inclusive course materials that prioritize diverse learner needs. This guide most directly aligns with Ethical and Legal Considerations as it helps instructors understand their responsibilities to provide equitable access to educational content and comply with accessibility standards. It also enhances Creation and Curation by building practical skills in formatting and structuring course materials for accessibility. Lastly, it strengthens Digital Scholarship as participants learn how accessibility features support learning for all students and explore best practices for inclusive digital content design. Together, these competencies help instructors to produce course media that is accessible from the beginning, thoughtfully structured, and designed to serve the all learners in their courses.

The eight Digital Literacy Competencies in an octagon shape with the Ethical and Legal Considerations. Digital Scholarship, and Creation and Curation highlighted

This graphic was created using the “Digital Literacy Framework Competency Stamp Generator” by Luke McKnight, Briana Fraser, and Katherine Cheung and is licensed under CC by 4.0

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Module References

Bowen, J. (2021, October 21). Why is it important for students to feel a sense of belonging at school? ‘students choose to be in environments that make them feel a sense of fit,’ says associate professor Deleon Gray. College of Education News. Retrieved March 20, 2023, from https://ced.ncsu.edu/news/2021/10/21/why-is-it-important-for-students-to-feel-a-sense-of-belonging-at-school-students-choose-to-be-in-environments-that-make-them-feel-a-sense-of-fit-says-associate-professor-deleon-gra/

Fiorella, L. (2021). Multimedia Learning with Instructional Video. In R. Mayer & L. Fiorella (Eds.), The Cambridge Handbook of Multimedia Learning (Cambridge Handbooks in Psychology, 3rd ed., pp. 487-497). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/9781108894333.050

Knott, R. (2020, March 10). Myth busted: This is the best video length (or is it?). The TechSmith Blog. Retrieved March 16, 2023, from https://www.techsmith.com/blog/video-length/

Phillips, C., & Colton, J. S. (2021). A new normal in inclusive, usable online learning experiences. In Thurston, T. N., Lundstrom, K., & González, C. (Eds.), Resilient pedagogy: Practical teaching strategies to overcome distance, disruption, and distraction (pp. 169-186). Utah State University. https://doi.org/10.26079/a516-fb24.

The UDL guidelines. UDL. (2022, September 2). Retrieved March 3, 2023, from https://udlguidelines.cast.org/

User experiences and benefits to organizations. Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI). (n.d.). Retrieved March 25, 2023, from https://www.w3.org/WAI/media/av/users-orgs/#:~:text=Accessible%20media%20is%20essential%20for,than%20watched%20or%20listened%20to

Welcome to the Inclusive Design Guide. The Inclusive Design Guide. (n.d.). Retrieved March 10, 2023, from https://guide.inclusivedesign.ca/

Who benefits from accessible media? SNOW. (2018, August 22). Retrieved March 10, 2023, from https://snow.idrc.ocadu.ca/accessible-media-and-documents/who-benefits-from-accessible-media/

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