If you sell online courses, the first thing that usually surprises you is how much accessibility responsibility still belongs to you after you have chosen a platform. Teachable, Kajabi, Thinkific, Podia, LearnWorlds, and Mighty Networks all market themselves as production-ready. They are, for the parts they control. But the parts you upload -- your video lessons, your PDF worksheets, your sales pages, your email funnels -- are yours. And those are the parts that draw demand letters.
This guide is written for creators, not developers. If you can edit a sales page, upload a video, and paste a link into an email, you can do every fix in this article.
Why this matters more than you probably think
Course creators tend to assume that accessibility complaints target big e-commerce stores and government sites. That is no longer true. Over the past eighteen months, plaintiffs' firms in California, New York, and Florida have expanded demand-letter campaigns into online education. The targets are solo creators running six- and seven-figure course businesses on hosted platforms, not just large edtech companies.
There are three reasons the sector is getting attention. First, course sales pages tend to be long, image-heavy, and video-dependent -- a combination that produces obvious accessibility failures. Second, the transactional flow is clear: the plaintiff attempted to enroll, could not, and has damages. Third, the European Accessibility Act now covers consumer-facing education services for EU residents, which means even a U.S.-based creator with a handful of EU students may be in scope.
The good news is that most of the fixes are cheap. You do not need to migrate platforms or hire a developer. You need to check a list of specific things, most of which you already know how to change.
What your platform actually handles
Let's be fair to the platforms. Modern course-hosting tools do get some accessibility basics right out of the box. Teachable, Kajabi, and Thinkific all ship with:
- Keyboard-accessible navigation on their default themes
- Reasonable color contrast in most theme presets
- Alt-text fields on image uploads (though they don't force you to fill them)
- Captions support on video players (though the captions themselves are yours to provide)
- Accessible form controls on checkout and signup pages
That gets you maybe sixty percent of the way there. The remaining forty percent is the material you upload. Let's work through it.
The five things that are actually your responsibility
1. Video captions -- real ones, not auto-generated
This is the single biggest accessibility failure in online courses. Every platform will happily let you upload a video and play it with no captions. Many creators rely on auto-generated YouTube or Vimeo captions and assume that meets the standard. It does not.
WCAG 2.2 requires captions for all prerecorded video content. The caption track must be accurate -- that is, correct words in the right sequence, with speaker identification when more than one person is speaking, and with relevant non-speech sounds noted. Auto-captions routinely get technical terms wrong, miss speaker changes, and drop whole phrases. If your course uses industry jargon, your auto-captions are almost certainly inaccurate enough to fail an audit.
The fix is straightforward. Upload your video to Descript, Rev, or a similar service, clean up the auto-generated transcript (it takes about two minutes per minute of video), and export a .srt or .vtt caption file. Upload that file alongside your video in your course platform's video manager.
For longer courses, batch this work. Process all your existing videos in a single afternoon; then make "export cleaned captions" part of your post-production checklist for new videos. If you need help with the details, our video accessibility and captions guide walks through the process step by step.
2. Transcripts for audio-only content
If your course includes audio recordings -- podcast-style interviews, guided meditations, pronunciation drills -- you need a text transcript. The same services that clean up your captions will produce a transcript as a side effect. Paste the transcript into a text lesson below the audio player, or attach it as a downloadable file.
If you are selling a course that is heavily audio-based and has no transcripts, a deaf-blind student using a refreshable braille display literally cannot take your course. That is the scenario an audit report will describe, and it is an easy one to fix.
3. PDFs that are actually readable
Course creators love PDFs. Workbooks, printable checklists, recipe cards, worksheets. The problem is that most course PDFs are exported from Canva, Keynote, or a Word document and then never opened in Acrobat. The result is a file that screen readers either cannot read at all or read in the wrong order.
There are three quick checks you can do on any PDF you sell.
First, can you select text with your mouse? If the PDF is an image (your selection tool does nothing), it is not accessible. Re-export from the source document, not a screenshot.
Second, can you tab through form fields? If your worksheet has fillable fields, tab order matters. In Acrobat Pro (or free alternatives like Sejda), you can set the tab order explicitly.
Third, does the PDF have alt text on its images? Most Canva exports do not. Canva added alt-text support in late 2024; double-check each image before you export. If you are stuck with PDFs you cannot fix, our accessible PDF guide walks through remediation.
A reasonable target: if a student cannot read your workbook with a screen reader, the workbook is not compliant, no matter how pretty it looks.
4. Sales pages that work without vision
Sales pages for online courses are usually long-scroll Kajabi or Teachable pages with testimonials, hero videos, bullet lists of benefits, and a big buy button at the bottom. The accessibility problems are usually in four places.
Hero video. If autoplay is on and there is audio, that is a WCAG 1.4.2 failure. Turn off autoplay, or keep autoplay on but mute the audio by default with a visible play button.
Testimonial images. Photos of students with the quote rendered as text on the image are inaccessible by default. The quote should be real HTML text, with the photo as a separate image with meaningful alt text ("Maria, who lost twenty pounds in three months").
Icon-only feature lists. Many themes render benefits as an icon next to a short label. The icon is usually decorative, which is fine, but the label must be real text. Check by turning off images in your browser -- can you still read the page?
The buy button. The single most important element on the page. It should be a real button with descriptive text ("Buy the Full Course for $497") rather than a button that says "Click here" or, worse, an image styled as a button. Click it with your keyboard Tab key. It should work.
5. Checkout and onboarding emails
After the purchase, your course platform sends a series of emails: welcome, login details, first-lesson reminder. These are often edited by the creator to match their brand voice, and in the editing they frequently break accessibility.
Three things to watch. First, if you paste images into your emails (course thumbnails, welcome banners), each image needs alt text. Most email editors have an alt-text field; use it. Second, if you embed colored call-to-action buttons, use the email editor's button component rather than an image of a button -- that way the text inside the button is real text. Third, avoid long links as anchor text ("https://learn.example.com/p/my-course/lessons/1"); replace them with descriptive text ("Start your first lesson").
The same principles apply to abandoned-cart sequences and drip funnels. If you are using Kajabi's built-in email tool or a third-party platform like ConvertKit, the accessibility expectations are identical.
The quick audit: twenty minutes with your own course
Here is a twenty-minute self-audit you can run on any course you sell.
Open a private or incognito browser window. Go to your course sales page. Without using your mouse at all, press Tab repeatedly until you reach the buy button. Every interactive element should be reachable, and you should be able to see where you are on the page (a visible focus outline). Buy the course (use a test coupon or refund after).
Now log in to the course as a student. Tab through the lesson navigation. Open a lesson. Play a video. Turn on captions. Are they accurate? Tab to the next lesson. Download a PDF worksheet. Open it. Can you select the text?
If any of those steps break, you have found your first remediation item.
Platform-specific notes
Teachable. Alt-text fields exist on image uploads but are not required. Theme defaults are reasonably accessible; heavily customized themes often introduce contrast problems in button and link colors. Caption upload uses .vtt format.
Kajabi. The page builder is powerful and therefore easy to break. Watch for low-contrast text on gradient backgrounds. Kajabi's offer pages use a default hero-video block that autoplays with sound -- turn that off. Caption support uses .vtt files on Wistia-hosted videos.
Thinkific. Alt-text support is good across all upload flows. Caption upload is straightforward. Their Site Builder includes an accessibility checker that catches some common issues; run it before publishing.
Podia. Simpler platform with fewer customization options, which often means fewer accessibility breaks. Caption support is solid. Watch for long sales-page layouts rendered as a single image -- this is a common failure mode for creators migrating from Instagram-style pages.
LearnWorlds. More enterprise-oriented; accessibility is better than average for a hosted platform. Their built-in video player supports captions, audio descriptions, and transcripts. Use all three for any course that includes visual-only content.
Mighty Networks. Community-oriented; most accessibility problems show up in user-generated content (member posts, comments). As the host, you are still responsible for the platform meeting WCAG 2.2 AA.
What to do if you receive a demand letter
If a plaintiff sends you a pre-litigation demand letter alleging your course is inaccessible, do three things before responding.
First, do not panic and do not pay immediately. Many letters are boilerplate and overstate the damages the plaintiff could actually recover.
Second, get a real audit from a qualified accessibility professional. A letter from a plaintiff's attorney does not substitute for a neutral audit of your actual content.
Third, engage an attorney who has handled ADA or Unruh Act accessibility claims before. This is a specialized area; a general small-business attorney is likely to recommend settlement amounts that are higher than necessary.
If you want background reading while you work out next steps, our guide to responding to an accessibility complaint walks through the first seventy-two hours in detail.
The bigger picture
Accessibility on course platforms is not a one-time fix. Each new course adds new videos, new PDFs, new emails. The goal is to build the habits into your production workflow so that captions, alt text, and readable PDFs are done by default, not retrofitted after a complaint.
You do not need to be a developer to run an accessible course business. You need to know which twenty percent of the work your platform doesn't do for you, and you need to do that twenty percent every time you launch.
We're building a simple accessibility checker for non-developers -- no DevTools, no jargon. Join our waitlist to get early access.
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