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Online training without a transcript is not fully accessible — it never was. When a session ends with no written record, it quietly excludes a significant proportion of learners: people who are Deaf or hard of hearing, those with auditory processing differences, ADHD, working memory difficulties, non-native speakers, and many others. Most of these needs are invisible to a facilitator; participants won’t announce them, they’ll simply get less from the session — or not attend at all. Transcripts aren’t a special accommodation. They’re part of how good training works.

Earlier this week, Brickfield Education Labs co-founder and CEO Gavin Henrick joined the expert panel at Empowering Teachers to Create Digital Content, the closing event of the TD3C project in Dublin. Here he shares his reflections on the day and his fuller thoughts on accessibility, copyright, and what it really means to put teachers at the centre of digital education.

Accessibility overlays promise a fast, low-cost path to compliance — but growing evidence from regulators, accessibility experts, and disability organisations shows they often fail to deliver. This article examines why overlays don’t fix underlying accessibility barriers, how they can interfere with assistive technologies, and why legal and regulatory bodies increasingly reject them as a compliance solution. More importantly, it outlines what genuine, sustainable digital accessibility actually requires.

Why ALL CAPS Text Creates Reading Barriers The research is clear: capitalising text doesn’t help readers — it hinders them Picture yourself reading a paragraph… Read More »Why ALL CAPS Text Creates Reading Barriers

Animated text overlays are everywhere — words bouncing, flashing, and flying across our screens in sync with speech. They look like captions, but they aren’t. When text is burned into a video instead of provided as a proper caption file, viewers lose control, assistive technologies lose access, and accessibility quietly disappears. This article explains why captions are infrastructure, not decoration — and how creators can keep their videos engaging without excluding the people who rely on captions most.