How to produce videos that are accessible and improve learning

Here are some tips on how to produce videos that are accessible and improve learning via good design and implementation. The video below illustrates various techniques to reach both objectives.

Why is this so important?

Tips on how to produce accessible videos that improve learning

  • Always present with the assumption that a person in the audience has low vision, blindness, a learning disability (dyslexia, etc), hard of hearing, deaf or experience comorbidity (multiple disabilities).
  • Always present with the assumption that some students may not be native English speakers.
  • Use a larger font size (18pt or larger), sans serif fonts, and sufficient white space.
  • Use graphics/images that directly relate to your topic. This will support visual and auditory learning.
  • Avoid the use of the color red to convey messages. For those who are color blind, that may not be visible to them.
  • Use contrasting colors with your slides. Use simple and clean PowerPoint slide design style, they are less distracting.
  • Inform your audience what your video will cover at the beginning of your video.
  • Describe your slides and read your text out loud. Reading your text will ensure that auto-closed captions will capture the content on your slides. If your slides include a lot of information, zoom-in to improve visibility. Consider converting your PowerPoint slides into a PDF in order to zoom-in.
  • If there are images in your PowerPoint presentation and your sharing your slides with the audience later, please add “alt text” to each image. 
  • Use a good quality microphone and record in a quiet room to improve caption quality. Poor audio quality will result in poor closed caption quality.
  • Use the annotation tools to point, circle, or draw on your screen to improve attention and visibility of important content. ZOOM, Kaltura, PowerPoint, and KeyNote all have annotations drawing tools.

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