Creating accessible Wooclap Events: a guide for educators

What if one small change could make your Wooclap Event even more engaging? The answer lies in accessibility. Great sessions don’t just deliver content, they meet learners where they are. Wooclap offers many features that, when used thoughtfully, can help you reach your audience more effectively. With a bit of creativity and flexibility, you can create an experience where every learner can perceive, understand, and participate further.

1. Hearing and Seeing

Running a Wooclap Event as an educator is primarily an audiovisual exercise: it involves sharing knowledge verbally and supplementing it with dynamic visual aids. For a Wooclap Event to be effective, educators must ensure clear access to both auditory and visual content.

Learners may struggle to hear you due to noise pollution (cross-talking, moving objects, loud activities), seating distance and voice variation (accents, speed, articulation, volume). This can reduce speech intelligibility and contribute to hearing fatigue. Sudden sounds (alarms, clapping) can also be disruptive, stressful, and triggering for some.

• Wooclap reduces noise by offering visual means of communication: 
• The Message Wall allows learners to type questions and comments
• The “I am Confused” Button allows learners to indicate confusion without interrupting the speaker.
• Emoji reactions, and Upvoting features present on Open Questions and Brainstorming allows them to react to information without making noise. 
• To maximize access to speech, we recommend using a microphone with live captions and transcripts for all audio. 

Learners may struggle to see learning materials due to seating distance. A learning setting’s brightness can obscure visual cues (gestures and facial expressions) if set too low, or cause headaches and eye strain if set too high. Extraneous stimuli on presentations can distract learners and contribute to mind-wandering or sensory overload. 

• Wooclap reduces visual barriers by allowing learners to use their own personal devices (which they can customize to their individual viewing preferences):
• Learners can view their performance instantly during the event, and after it in a Personalized Report. 
• When educators opt to “show slides on participant devices in real-time,” learners can view them from any distance. 
• To maximize access to visuals, we recommend including titles, captions, and alternative text for all visuals (pictures, charts, graphs). 

2. Understanding and Connecting Ideas

Making a Wooclap Event is an exercise of structure: it starts with breaking down complex ideas into manageable pieces, and organizing them in a logical flow. For a Wooclap Event to be effective, educators must guide learners through information step by step, ensuring each slide and question builds on the last and is easy to follow.

An inconsistent structure can make it difficult for learners to follow and understand. When the logic or flow of information is unclear, it becomes harder to see how ideas connect. Inconsistent use of visuals, headings, or slide formats can create cognitive friction, making learners spend more effort figuring out how to follow the content instead of focusing on what it means.

• Wooclap offers over 20 question types with pre-designed layouts and ready-to-use templates, allowing educators to focus on content instead of formatting. To communicate content organization clearly, it's helpful to provide a brief outline at the start of an Event. This can be easily done by adding a table of contents to a Slide within the Wooclap event itself, or by using the Wooclap add-ins for PowerPoint or Google Slides.
• Wooclap has several features that can help you implement a routine:
• An Event can be started with opening questions such as Open Question (e.g. "Any questions from last class?") or Find on Image (e.g. "Which photo describes your energy level today?"). 
• For closing questions, a Rating Scale ("How confident are you with today's material?") or a Poll ("Which topic needs further clarification in next course?") can be effective.

An unpredictable structure with sudden shifts in topic or activity can disorient learners and make them feel unsure of where the session is headed. Without clear transitions, it becomes difficult to anticipate what’s coming next. Abrupt shifts can cause learners to lose focus or fall out of sync with their peers, especially during interactive moments.

• Clearly announcing transitions between topics or activities is crucial. Briefly reviewing previous information helps learners connect it with new knowledge:
• Wooclap's Slide feature can be used to end sections and announce transitions (e.g., "New Topic: [Title]"). 
• Wooclap Questions, such as an Open Question ("What is the most important takeaway from this section?") or a Rating Question ("How confident are you in your understanding of [topic]?"), can also serve as effective transitions.

How to further help learners understand and connect ideas in a Wooclap Event:

• Wooclap offers various questions that can help learners find key information and visualize relationships between concepts: 
• The Brainstorming Question contains columns that can be used to collect information into categories. 
• The Framework Question provide visual organizers (like outlines and charts) to collect and organize ideas. while Framework starts with a guided pre-defined diagram. 
• They can be filled in asynchronously (so that slides related to the presentation can be viewed while learners fill in the Brainstorming).

3. Following and Engaging

Making a Wooclap Event also means thinking carefully about pacing. Because the platform involves real-time interaction, it's important to allow enough time for all learners to access, process, and respond to information, to ensure that no one is left behind.

Learners may need more time to adapt information into a format that works best for them; for example, if they need to convert speech to text or add descriptions to visuals. The process of requesting, receiving, and setting up these materials can cause delays, leaving them out of sync with their peers and reducing their ability to engage in real time.

• Wooclap can foster flexibility in participation by making its Events open for preview and response before, during, and after the live presentation. Setting Questionnaires to Participant Pace allows learners to answer at their own rhythm, and displaying Participant Pace live can merge asynchronous and live responses during a session. 

Learners may need more energy to access information in alternative formats (like reading rapidly scrolling captions or listening to screen readers for long periods) because it requires more concentration and processing.

• Wooclap can help facilitate pauses and breaks to accommodate learners' rhythms:
• The Timer can be used to count down break or reflection time. 
• Word Cloud or Poll can create a change of pace or provide an alternative mode of engagement. 
• To further manage fatigue, we recommend you to arrange questions by difficulty, by avoiding challenging questions at the end of a course, and use cues (e.g., asterisks) to indicate difficulty. 

Learners may have different availability and speeds for responding. Factors like cognitive processing styles, management of sensory inputs, physical needs (and the 2 points mentioned above) mean that the optimal moment for participation can vary greatly.

• We recommend you to record all class sessions and make them available for review to compensate for missed information, misunderstood details, and physical challenges (e.g., fine motor skills, writing speed). A Personal Report or Group Report can be sent to participants, including their answers and correct answers.

By embracing these accessibility features and adopting a thoughtful approach to planning and delivery, educators can transform their Wooclap Events into truly inclusive learning experiences. Remember, accessibility isn't just about compliance; it's about empowering every learner to participate fully and thrive. You're already taking the first step by considering how to make your events more inclusive, and that makes a real difference.