Accessible vs inclusive learning - what’s the difference?

In this Insights post, eLaHub explores the difference between accessible and inclusive learning, why both are essential and how together they set the standard for excellent learning design.

When I wrote the first edition of Designing Accessible Learning Content, I was very aware that I still had a lot to learn. Since eLaHub was founded in 2019, our training, consultancy, and auditing work with more than 150 organisations across the private, public and voluntary sectors has given us the opportunity to see first-hand the accessibility challenges learning teams face.

It has also challenged and developed our own thinking.

One area that we still find creates confusion is the difference between accessible and inclusive learning. The two are closely connected, and there is considerable overlap between them, but we have found it useful to distinguish between the two.

For us at eLaHub, accessibility provides the essential foundation. Inclusive learning takes us further by considering the wider learner experience.

What do we mean by accessible learning?

W3C describes web accessibility as enabling people with disabilities to:

“Perceive, understand, navigate and interact with digital content and to contribute without barriers.”

The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) provide the internationally recognised technical standard used to help achieve this.

Consider your learners’ access needs

For learning practitioners, this means thinking about whether someone with a disability or access need can actually access and use the learning.

Can someone using a screen reader access and follow the content?
Can someone with low vision read the text and identify the controls?
Can someone who cannot use a mouse complete the interactions?
Can someone who is deaf access the information in a video?
Can someone with processing issues pause or hide distracting moving animation?

WCAG 2.2 is the latest version of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines and contains 86 success criteria across three levels: A, AA and AAA. Level AA is the level most commonly used as the benchmark for accessibility legislation and best practice internationally. To conform at Level AA, content must meet all Level A and Level AA success criteria, which means 55 requirements in total. Not every one of these will apply to every piece of learning content, but practitioners still need to understand which requirements are relevant and how to apply them.

Get started with WCAG

Through our training work, we know that WCAG can feel overwhelming at first, particularly because of the number of requirements and the technical language used to describe them. One way we help practitioners make sense of the standards is by connecting individual requirements with the access needs they support.

At this stage, the focus is specifically on accessibility, which for eLaHub means understanding and meeting the relevant standards. The following four examples each relate to one of the main access needs and help show what WCAG can look like in practice. They are also among the issues we identify most consistently across the hundreds of hours we have spent auditing learning content for organisations across different sectors.

Supporting vision access needs

WCAG 2.2 Success Criterion 1.4.3 Contrast (Minimum) requires sufficient contrast between text and its background. Normal-sized text generally needs a contrast ratio of at least 4.5:1, while large text needs at least 3:1. Success Criterion 1.4.11 Non-text Contrast also requires sufficient contrast for meaningful visual information such as controls, states and important parts of graphics.

These requirements can make a significant difference to people with low vision, colour vision differences/colour blindness and reduced contrast sensitivity. They are also examples of accessibility requirements that often improve readability and usability much more widely.

Supporting hearing access needs

Success Criterion 1.2.2 Captions (Prerecorded) requires captions for prerecorded synchronised media containing audio.

Good captions which provide an equivalent experience to people with hearing access needs do more than capture the words being spoken. They also need to include information that is important to the meaning, such as who is speaking and relevant sounds or sound effects. Another important requirement is that they need to be accurate.

This is something we focus on heavily in our eLaHub training because we so often find issues with captions in our auditing work. In particular, we regularly find automatically generated captions that contain errors, miss out important information or do not make it clear who is speaking. These issues can completely change the meaning of what is being communicated, which is why we stress that automatic captions should always be checked and edited.

Supporting motor access needs

Success Criterion 2.1.1 Keyboard means that people should be able to use the functionality in digital learning without needing a mouse on a desktop or their fingers on a mobile device. This is important for anyone who relies on a keyboard or technology that works through keyboard commands.

We come across problems with this regularly in our eLearning audits, particularly with learning interactions. Something may work perfectly well with a mouse or touchscreen but become difficult or impossible to complete using a keyboard alone.

Drag-and-drop activities are a good example. Success Criterion 2.5.7 Dragging Movements, introduced in WCAG 2.2, means that where an activity relies on dragging, another way of completing the same action should usually be provided. This is something we often check when auditing learning content.

Supporting cognitive access needs

Success Criterion 2.2.2 Pause, Stop, Hide gives people control over moving, blinking, scrolling or automatically updating content.

Movement can be particularly distracting for some people with cognitive disabilities and attention-related access needs. For moving, blinking or scrolling content, the WCAG requirement applies when it starts automatically, lasts for more than five seconds and appears alongside other content. In those circumstances, people need a way to pause, stop or hide it.

In our eLaHub training, we encourage practitioners to think beyond those specific WCAG criteria. Even when movement does not technically meet all of those conditions, it can still be distracting or make information harder to process. Giving learners greater control can therefore make the learning easier to use. And this applies to everyone, not only people with cognitive access needs.

These are some of the examples we often start with when introducing accessibility and what it means to meet relevant standards. Linking each one to a different access need helps practitioners connect the technical requirements with the people they are designed to support, rather than treating WCAG as a technical checklist.

For more practical examples, our 20 eLearning accessibility tips for different access needs Insights post includes further guidance and a downloadable leaflet with tips covering vision, hearing, motor and cognitive access needs. For a more in-depth exploration of accessible and inclusive learning, our eLaHub ultimate guide to accessible and inclusive eLearning brings together more detailed guidance for learning practitioners.

WCAG gives us the foundation

We find that thinking about WCAG through the lens of different access needs makes the standards easier to apply in practice. The success criteria themselves provide a consistent set of requirements for checking whether learning content is accessible. That gives us an essential foundation, but it cannot tell us everything about the experience someone has with the learning.

W3C itself acknowledges that WCAG cannot address every need of every person with a disability. It also distinguishes accessibility from the wider concepts of usability and inclusion. Accessibility focuses specifically on people with disabilities, while inclusion considers diversity and involvement more broadly.

We experience that distinction very clearly in our own auditing work. Our technical testing checks learning against WCAG and identifies accessibility failures, while our lived-experience testing helps us explore what the content is actually like to use. A learning resource can meet technical requirements and still be frustrating, confusing or require considerably more effort for some learners.

This is where our thinking about inclusive learning comes in.

What do we mean by inclusive learning?

At eLaHub, we describe inclusive learning in terms of the experience we are trying to create.

“Inclusive learning content makes all learners feel welcomed, considered and valued and provides an excellent learner experience for everyone.”

Accessibility is central to this, but inclusion takes us beyond technical conformance. It encourages us to consider the language we use, the people represented in our content, the choices learners are given, how easy information is to process and whether people feel that their access needs have genuinely been considered.

Good instructional design is also part of our definition of inclusive learning. Clear instructions, plain language, a logical structure and content broken into manageable chunks can all contribute to a better learning experience. Interaction should also have a clear purpose rather than simply being added to make learning feel more ‘engaging’.

The following four examples are not WCAG requirements, but they can make a significant difference to how inclusive the learning feels for disabled people and people with access needs. As with the accessibility examples above, we have chosen them because they are issues we see frequently across our auditing work and because they give practitioners a practical sense of what inclusive learning can look like beyond meeting technical standards.

Note: Inclusive learning can, of course, be considered much more broadly and include many other aspects of diversity such as age, race and ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation and socio-economic circumstances. eLaHub’s particular focus is disability and access needs.

Give people clear accessibility information and support

Before someone starts learning, they should be able to find out what accessibility features are available, whether there are any known barriers and where to go if they need support. A great way to do this is to provide an accessibility statement that brings that information together in one place and removes a lot of uncertainty for learners.

For some organisations, particularly in the public sector, publishing an accessibility statement is a legal requirement. But even when an organisation is not legally required to publish one, providing clear accessibility information and an obvious route for support can still be extremely valuable. It shows that accessibility has been considered and helps people know what they can expect and what to do if they come across a barrier.

Accessibility statements, both for individual learning resources and at an organisational level, are something organisations regularly ask us to support through our consultancy work. We find these conversations really valuable as they often lead into wider strategic questions about who is responsible for accessibility, how support is provided and how an organisation communicates its commitment to accessibility.

Use language that includes different ways of interacting

Instructions can very easily assume that everyone interacts with learning in the same way. Words like click and type are so common that we often use them without thinking, but they can imply that someone is using a mouse, touchscreen or physical keyboard.

Using more neutral language avoids making that assumption. Select the answer works whether someone is using a mouse, keyboard, switch device or another form of assistive technology. Enter your response is similarly more inclusive than type your response, because it does not dictate how the learner should provide their answer. These are small changes, but they can make the language around an interaction feel much more inclusive.

Avoid blocks of capital letters

Inclusive design also means paying attention to things that may not result in a specific WCAG failure but can still make learning harder to read and process.

Blocks of CAPITAL LETTERS are a good example. Sentence case is generally much easier to read because the familiar shape of lower-case words helps us recognise them more quickly, which in turn makes it easier for us to skim and scan read. GOV.UK guidance recommends avoiding block capitals because they are harder to read, while the British Dyslexia Association advises against using whole phrases all in capital letters because this can make words harder to recognise and read.

This can be particularly helpful for dyslexic learners, but the benefit is much wider than that. Long headings, instructions or long blocks of text written in capitals can feel visually dense and take more effort to work through. Using sentence case is a very simple choice that can make learning feel clearer and easier to process for everyone.

Include disability in learning content imagery

Imagery can technically meet WCAG because it has an appropriate text alternative but still fail to feel inclusive. In our audits, we often come across learning where disability representation is limited to familiar stereotypes, often a single image of a wheelchair user or someone shown only when disability or accessibility is being discussed.

In our eLaHub training, we encourage practitioners to think carefully about the people represented in their learning imagery and to include disabled people naturally, not only when disability or accessibility is the subject. We try to model that same practice ourselves across our training and presentation materials and on the eLaHub website, using imagery that reflects a much broader range of people and access needs.

A resource we recommend and explore further in our training is the Getty Images Diversity, Equity & Inclusion Imagery Toolkit, which describes how authentic representation can “change perceptions and shift mindsets”. That is exactly why the imagery we choose in learning is important. It can reinforce familiar stereotypes, or it can help create a broader and more realistic picture of disability and the people taking part in our learning.

Why we need both accessible and inclusive learning content

The distinction between accessible and inclusive learning has become increasingly useful in our work with organisations. Accessibility gives us a way to identify and remove barriers through recognised, testable standards. Inclusive learning asks us to consider the experience we create around that accessible foundation.

Someone may technically be able to complete a piece of learning and still have a much poorer experience than other learners. They might have to work considerably harder to navigate it with assistive technology, struggle with unnecessarily complicated instructions, feel overlooked by the people and situations represented, or encounter interactions that are technically accessible but difficult to use.

This is where inclusive learning takes us further. As we’ve explored, for eLaHub it means creating learning where people feel welcomed, considered and valued, and where everyone has the opportunity to have an excellent learning experience. In other words:

“Accessibility gives people access to the learning. Inclusive design asks us to consider the experience they have once they get there.”

Accessible and inclusive learning as the standard for excellence

For me, this is where the conversation about excellent learning design needs to move. Learning cannot really be described as excellent if some people cannot access it because of their access needs or circumstances. Technical accessibility alone is not enough either if some learners have to work considerably harder or have a significantly poorer experience once they are there.

Accessible and inclusive learning brings those things together. People can access and participate in the learning, while the learning itself has been designed to provide an excellent experience across a much wider range of access needs and circumstances.

Our Designing Accessible Learning Content Programme has given us powerful evidence that accessible and inclusive design are integral to excellent learning design. In 2025, the programme received a Gold Brandon Hall Group award for Learning and Development and a Silver Learning Technologies Award for Excellence in the Design of Learning Content in the international commercial sector.

For us, both awards were particularly significant because DALC was being recognised for the learning itself, rather than simply for being accessible. Accessibility and inclusion were built into the programme from the start, but they did not sit separately from the instructional design. They were part of what made the learning work.

That is the standard I would like to see across our industry. Learning that people can genuinely access regardless of their access needs or circumstances, and an excellent learning experience that makes them feel considered once they are there. Raising that expectation does not only improve learning for people with disabilities and access needs.

It gives us the opportunity to create better learning for everyone.

About this article

Written by: Susi Miller and the eLaHub team
Published: July 2026

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Accessible vs inclusive learning – what’s the difference?