Accessible eLearning interactions should support learning without creating unnecessary barriers or effort. In this post we explore what screen reader testing taught us about designing more meaningful interactions.
During a recent eLaHub accessibility audit, our screen reader tester, Kirsty Wolf, came up with a valuable analogy for the difference between interaction and meaningful engagement.
The learning we were auditing included an interactive exercise where learners had to select a series of buttons to reveal information. First they had to select a button to open a policy. Next they had to select a button to reveal each of the key points about the policy. They then had to repeat this process to select and then reveal the information for procedures and responsibilities. In her user experience report, Kirsty described what it was like to work through these interactions using a screen reader:
“I feel like a dog who has to get the treats out of the puzzle toy one by one rather than just eating the treats. This makes me sad. There is so much clicking on these slides. First, click the policy. Then click the key points. Then click each of the key points in turn before you go on to procedures and responsibilities. It would be so nice to have this information in a format where I could just read it without all this clicking and interacting.”
Kirsty’s analogy made a big impact on us at eLaHub because it was such a great way of explaining something we regularly see in our auditing work. An interaction included in your eLearning can meet technical accessibility requirements but still create unnecessary effort for the learner.
This is one of the reasons every eLaHub audit includes a separate user experience report from Kirsty, based on her lived experience of using a screen reader. Our audit checks the learning content against WCAG standards and identifies technical accessibility issues, while Kirsty’s report describes what the learning is actually like to use. Together with our eLaHub recommendations, this allows us to consider the wider usability and learner experience as well as just the technical compliance of standards.
This reflects the distinction we make between accessible and inclusive learning. Accessibility provides the essential foundation, including whether disabled people and people with access needs can access and operate the content. Inclusive learning goes further by considering whether people feel welcomed and considered and whether they can have an equally good learning experience. We explore this distinction in our Insights post, Accessible vs inclusive learning – so what’s the difference?.
What our technical testing showed
From a technical accessibility perspective, there are several things we need to test when information is hidden behind expandable buttons or panels. A screen reader user needs to know that the element is interactive, understand what it will reveal and be told whether it is currently expanded or collapsed. They also need to be able to activate it from the keyboard and then locate and read the content that has appeared.
In our eLearning accessibility audits of these interactions our testing includes things like keyboard operation, accessible names, control states, focus order and the reading order of the content that is revealed. The interaction Kirsty was using could be tested against technical requirements one control at a time, but her user experience report gave us something those checks could not. It showed us the cumulative experience of having to operate all of those controls simply to reach straightforward information.
This is also why our eLaHub accessibility auditing goes beyond automated checking. Testing with assistive technology and involving people with lived experience can reveal barriers that are difficult to appreciate when we look only at individual WCAG requirements.
Our eLaHub ultimate guide to eLearning accessibility auditing and testing explores the different levels of accessibility testing in more detail, including automated testing, manual checks, assistive technology and testing with disabled people.
A wider lesson for every learner
When we thought more closely about Kirsty’s dog-treat analogy and why it had made such an impact on us, we realised the issue went much wider than screen reader use. What had at first just seemed like an accessibility issue was actually a much broader learning design problem.
A learner may look active because they are repeatedly selecting buttons, opening panels and moving through layers of content. But that activity tells us very little about whether they are processing or applying what they have learned. Engagement comes from meaningful thinking, choice and practice, not from the number of interactions a learner has to make.
Repeated interaction can break up the flow of reading, make information harder to find again and pull attention away from what the learner actually needs to take in. That can affect anyone, but it is something our neurodivergent testers report particularly often, especially where lots of clicking, changing states or moving between layers adds unnecessary cognitive effort.
The amount of effort will vary from person to person, but the broader question on creating accessible interactions in your eLearning is the same. Does the interaction add meaningful learning value, or does it simply make everyone work harder to reach the content?
Interaction needs to earn its place
There are plenty of situations where interaction contributes directly to learning. A realistic scenario can give someone an opportunity to make a decision and explore the consequences. A question with useful feedback can help learners check what they know, identify a misconception and apply what they have learned.
The problem comes when interaction is added simply to make a screen appear more active or to avoid showing information as straightforward text.
A puzzle toy makes sense because working out how to retrieve the treat is part of its purpose. But if a learner simply needs to read and process a policy or procedure, making them uncover every part of it individually creates an additional task that has little connection with the learning outcome.
These are the questions we ask ourselves when we design interactions at eLaHub:
- What do we want the learner to think about or do?
- How does the interaction contribute to that?
- Would presenting the information directly be clearer?
- How much additional effort are we asking the learner to make?
- Can everyone operate and use the interaction?
- Does the interaction add meaningful learning value, or does it simply make everyone work harder to reach the content?
If the learner’s only task is to reveal information and then read it, there is a good chance that the interaction is adding effort without adding learning value.
When the authoring tool starts driving the design
This is an easy trap for learning practitioners to fall into, and one we see regularly in the audits we carry out for clients.
Rapid authoring tools give us buttons, tabs, accordions, layers, sliders and many other ready-made interactions. They are useful features, but their availability can start shaping the design before we have decided what learners actually need.
Five points of a policy can very quickly become five buttons because the tool makes that easy to build. A screen containing animation and clickable elements can also look more impressive during a stakeholder review than a clearly structured page of information.
The learner sees it differently. They need to find the information, process it and sometimes return to it later. Each additional interaction becomes another thing they need to operate and remember.
Instead of starting by asking how we can make a screen more interactive, a more useful question is:
What does the learner need to understand or do, and what is the clearest most accessible way to help them do it?
Sometimes the answer will involve adding an accessible interaction to your eLearning. Sometimes a well-written page with meaningful headings, concise paragraphs and properly structured lists will do the job much better.
Give learners a clearer route to essential information
Policy, procedure and compliance learning is a particularly good example because learners often need to read important information and may need to find it again afterwards.
Where information is essential, make it easy to reach. Clear headings can divide it into meaningful sections, while concise paragraphs and properly formatted lists make longer information easier to navigate. W3C guidance on headings and labels also recognises their role in helping people identify and understand the organisation of content.
Expandable panels can still be useful for optional supporting information or additional examples. If there is a genuine reason to use several of them, an Expand all option can give learners the choice to open everything and read it as one continuous resource.
A summary with clearly labelled links to further information can work well too, and for longer content an accessible webpage or reference document may make it much easier for someone to return to information later.
The aim is to give learners appropriate control rather than making everyone follow the same sequence of clicking and revealing.
Extra interaction can create extra barriers
The wider learning design issue does not remove the accessibility implications. In fact, the more controls we add, the more opportunities we create for barriers.
Every additional button becomes another stop for someone navigating by keyboard. People using switch technologies or speech input may also need to move to or activate every one of those controls. WCAG 2.2 Success Criterion 2.1.1 Keyboard requires functionality to be available through a keyboard interface so that people who cannot use a mouse can still operate the content.
Small or closely positioned controls can make interaction more difficult for people with reduced dexterity or fine motor movement. WCAG 2.2 Success Criterion 2.5.8 Target Size Minimum also addresses the size and spacing of pointer targets to help reduce problems caused by controls that are difficult to select accurately.
As our own testers frequently remind us, lots of steps, changing states and information hidden in different places can also create additional cognitive effort.
This brings us back to the benefit of starting with the simplest way of meeting the learning need. Fewer unnecessary interactions in your digital learning, mean fewer controls to make technically accessible, fewer potential barriers to test and less unnecessary effort for every learner.
When accessibility leads to better learning
This brings us back to what Kirsty’s experience helped us see. We started by looking at the interaction through the lens of accessibility and the experience of someone using a screen reader, but it led us to a much wider question about the learning design itself.
For us at eLaHub, that is exactly why Kirsty’s dog-treat analogy is so useful. It gives us a simple, memorable way to explain something that can otherwise get lost in technical accessibility discussions. An interaction may work with a screen reader and meet the relevant WCAG requirements, but that does not automatically make it a good learning experience. It’s an example we now repeatedly use across our consultancy, auditing and advocacy work and which we have turned into a key lesson in our Designing Accessible Learning Content Programme.
Looking closely at how people access and use learning can reveal unnecessary effort, complexity and barriers that affect far more people than we first realised. In this case, improving the experience for a screen reader user led us back to a much simpler principle that benefits everyone. Learners should be able to spend their effort processing, practising and applying the learning rather than retrieving it from the interface.
Kirsty’s analogy also gives us a question we can continue to use in our own work and share with other learning practitioners.
Are we helping learners actively engage with the content, or are we making them work simply to retrieve it?
That is a useful question to ask yourself before adding the next button, accordion or clickable panel.
About this article
Written by: Susi Miller and the eLaHub team
Published: August 2026
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Links and resources
- W3C: WCAG 2.2 Success Criterion 2.4.6 Headings and Labels
- W3C: WCAG 2.2 Success Criterion 2.1.1 Keyboard
- W3C: WCAG 2.2 Success Criterion 2.5.8 Target Size Minimum
- Accessible vs inclusive learning – so what’s the difference?
- eLaHub ultimate guide to eLearning accessibility auditing and testing
- Designing Accessible Learning Content Programme
