The Hidden Cost of Flashy: When ‘Engaging’ Design Hurts Learners

The Hidden Cost of Flashy Learning Design

Instructional designers are often under pressure to “make it engaging.” But what stakeholders usually mean is adding flashy animations, interactions, and a dose of gamification. Though that last one’s a conversation for another time.

The real issue is that flashy doesn’t always mean effective. And content isn’t truly engaging if it doesn’t help the learner perform.

But, what does this have to do with accessibility?

When engagement becomes a barrier to performance

Flashy features often work against the very people we’re designing for:

• Auto-play videos overwhelm neurodivergent learners and violate WCAG 2.2 Success Criterion 2.2.2: Pause, Stop, Hide.
  
  
• Drag-and-drop interactions are inaccessible by default in many popular tools like Articulate Rise and H5P. WCAG 2.2 Success Criterion 2.5.7: Dragging Movements.
  
  
• Visual-only carousels and pop-ups disrupt screen reader flow and create keyboard traps, making content unusable for many users. WCAG 2.2 Success Criterion 2.2.1 No Keyboard Trap.
  
  
• Animations or parallax effects can cause motion sickness and cognitive fatigue, especially for those with vestibular or neurological conditions. WCAG 2.2. Success Criterion 2.3.1 Three Flashes or Below Threshold.

Flashy ≠ functional. Clicky ≠ effective.

Instructional design isn’t about impressing your SMEs or stakeholders with bells and whistles. It’s about helping people learn to do something they couldn’t do before.

As Julie Dirksen reminds us in Talk to the Elephant: It’s not about what they know. It’s about what they can do.

Engagement without behavior change? That’s just entertainment.

So what does real engagement and accessibility look like?

• The course works without a mouse or trackpad.
• Learners understand the why behind each task.
• Feedback is immediate, actionable, and accessible.
• Learners leave with skills they can apply immediately.

That’s not flashy. That’s effective. Accessible design isn't about adding more clicks—it's about enabling competence.

Design smarter

Here’s how to balance accessibility, performance, and actual engagement:

Use interactions that mirror real-world decisions.
Replace flashy animations and hotspots with accessible branching scenarios or decision-making tasks. 

Focus on cognitive load, not visual load.
Minimize distractions. Use consistent structure and hierarchy (WCAG 1.3.1 Info and Relationships) to help all learners stay focused.

Provide multimodal access.
Support auditory, visual, and text-based preferences. Offer captions, transcripts, and alternative formats using tools like Otter.ai, Descript, and Recap.

Use accessibility testing tools early and often.
Try WAVE, axe DevTools, or even better pay a screen reader user to test it for you! 

🎯 Don’t just meet standards; instead design for real people.
As Lainey Feingold puts it: “Accessibility is not a ‘one and done’ thing. It’s an ongoing commitment to include all users in all technology.”

Final words

If your course only works for learners with perfect vision and endless patience, it doesn’t work.

If it looks beautiful but leads to zero behavior change? That’s not learning. That’s decoration.