In a world where online learning has become a crucial part of education, a key question arises: how can we make sure no one is left behind?

Today, accessibility is no longer just a box to tick—it's a collective responsibility and a powerful driver of inclusion. It ensures that everyone, whatever their situation, can access high-quality educational content in the best possible conditions.

Among the most widely used formats in e-learning, video holds a central place. It's dynamic, engaging, and flexible, but it must be designed in a truly accessible way. It’s not always obvious where to begin. What are the best practices to adopt? What tools can help us?

In this article, I’ll take you through four concrete steps to create more inclusive training videos!

Why and for Whom Should You Adapt Your Training Videos?

When we talk about accessibility, we often think first of people with disabilities. It’s true that adapting content for these audiences is essential to facilitate their learning process.

• For people with cognitive disorders, a clear, well-structured presentation without sensory overload is crucial to help them understand and absorb information.
  
  
• On the other hand, people with visual impairments need suitable alternatives, such as audio descriptions or text transcripts, to fully access content.
  
  
• Conversely, people with hearing impairments rely on rich visual elements—subtitles, illustrations, and diagrams—to follow a training session.
  
  

However, making your content accessible means considering a much broader audience. In short, it’s about providing a better learning experience for everyone, because the need for adaptation isn’t limited to people with disabilities.

• For example, learners whose first language isn't English gain a great deal of understanding when visual aids are designed to clearly illustrate key messages.
  
  
• Similarly, a clean, uncluttered interface free from sensory overload can be invaluable for people with mental health conditions or concentration difficulties.
  
  

Adapting your visual and audio content is therefore much more than a simple gesture of inclusion. It's a powerful way to make training smoother, more enjoyable, and more effective for all. This approach, far from segmenting, actually helps to unite and raise the level of accessibility for all learners.

Step 1: Use Accessibility Audit Tools

Making your content accessible doesn't just depend on good intentions or a set of principles to follow; it also requires concrete tools integrated into the platforms you use every day.

Some solutions now offer features specifically designed to guide content creators in this process. This is the case with Nudgis, the video platform developed by UbiCast. One of the platform's most useful features is an RGAA (General Accessibility Improvement Framework) indicator. This tool instantly flags colours that aren’t accessible on the platform or directly in the video player. This allows you to quickly spot problematic colour combinations (for example, those with too little contrast) and adjust them accordingly.

By integrating these features directly into the creation environment, the platform makes respecting accessibility standards simple. It saves instructional designers time while ensuring their videos are truly inclusive from the moment they are created.

Step 2: Add Subtitles and Transcriptions to Your Videos

Video is arguably one of the most effective formats for learning. It also has a valuable advantage in our quest for more accessible content: it allows the spoken content to be transcribed into text using subtitles or a transcript—a significant asset for anyone with a disability or who doesn't speak the language used in the video.

To be effective, synchronised subtitles must be carefully created: they need to faithfully transcribe the spoken content, be complete, and be perfectly aligned with the audio to ensure a fluid reading experience.

In addition to subtitles, a text transcript plays an equally important role. It provides a complete written version of the audio content, going beyond simple dialogue to also include descriptions of important visual elements that appear on screen.

Some video platforms make it much easier to implement these tools. For example, UbiCast's Nudgis offers automatic subtitling in over 70 languages and a downloadable transcript in .txt format, compatible with software used by many learners. In the near future, advanced features like automatic synchronised text transcription (karaoke mode), voice dubbing, and live automatic subtitling will further enrich the user experience.

Step 3: Optimise Navigation and Controls

Finally, a crucial yet often overlooked aspect of video shouldn't be neglected: navigation and controls.

Imagine trying to pause a video without being able to use your mouse, or wanting to rewind a few seconds without finding the right keyboard commands. For people with motor disabilities, inaccessible navigation and controls can make watching a video simply impossible.

This is why it's crucial to ensure that playback controls—like play, pause, and volume adjustment—are fully accessible via the keyboard and compatible with assistive technologies used by many people. It's also essential to avoid autoplay, which can be disruptive or overwhelming for some users, particularly those prone to sensory overload.

Step 4: Include Users in the Loop

Implementing actions to improve accessibility is a vital step, but it's only part of the journey. To ensure these adaptations are truly effective, it's essential to directly involve the people most concerned: users with disabilities.

They are in the best position to evaluate the effectiveness of the tools, identify persistent obstacles, and guide future improvements. Even with the best intentions and the most advanced tools, some problems can go unnoticed until they are confronted with real use. User testing is precisely what uncovers this. It provides concrete feedback on friction points, confusing aspects, and features that genuinely facilitate learning.

These tests can take several forms:

• Individual interviews: The ideal format for gathering detailed feedback from your users.
• Focus groups: They help identify shared experiences among several users and highlight common needs.
• Observed test sessions: They allow you to analyse in real time how users interact with your training videos and spot difficulties that might not have been verbally expressed.

The goal of this feedback isn't just to validate what works, but to continuously improve. Accessibility isn't a single step—it's a living, iterative process that must constantly adapt to needs, contexts, and technological changes. Integrating users into this creation and evaluation loop helps shift from a mindset of compliance to a true culture of inclusion. And that's where the impact becomes lasting and significant.

Conclusion

Making your training videos more inclusive is not just a matter of compliance or good intentions. It’s a human choice to allow every person to access knowledge fairly. By following the best practices shared here, you are helping to build learning environments that are more open, more accessible, and more effective for everyone.

Want to take it a step further? Remember to regularly evaluate your materials, train your teams on the importance of accessibility, and use the right tools to sustainably integrate these practices into your training strategy.