Why reducing cognitive load creates communities where more people can participate, connect, and thrive

Accessibility is often treated like a checklist: add captions, include transcripts, make sure the technology works. But what if accessibility is actually something much deeper? What if it is one of the clearest ways we communicate care and create spaces where people genuinely belong?

In this solo episode, Tonya Kubo expands on her conversation with Dr. Catrina Mitchum and explores why accessibility is about far more than compliance. Whether you're leading an online course, hosting a workshop, facilitating a community, or running an in-person event, every design decision either removes friction or creates it. Those choices shape who feels welcomed, who feels excluded, and who has the opportunity to fully participate.

Through practical examples ranging from breakout rooms and workshop activities to transcripts, captions, seating arrangements, and course design, Tonya unpacks the hidden impact of cognitive load. She challenges creators and community leaders to stop asking whether people can technically access an experience and start asking whether they've intentionally designed an experience that allows people to succeed.

More than anything, this episode is an invitation to view accessibility as an act of hospitality. Small, thoughtful changes don't just support people with disabilities. They create better experiences for parents, busy professionals, neurodivergent learners, and anyone who benefits from having multiple ways to engage. Because when people feel considered, they feel connected. And connection is where belonging begins.

You’ll hear how:

• Accessibility extends far beyond captions and transcripts
• Cognitive load influences how people participate and learn
• Thoughtful design benefits everyone, not just people with disabilities
• Online and in-person experiences can unintentionally create barriers
• Charging extra for basic accessibility features undermines belonging
• Every activity should be designed with a clear learning goal in mind
• Offering multiple ways to participate lowers barriers to engagement
• Small changes communicate care and strengthen community
• Asking "Who might be left out?" leads to more inclusive experiences
• Belonging cannot exist without meaningful access

Episode Highlights

[01:10] Why accessibility is about removing friction, not checking boxes

[05:00] How cognitive load shapes the way people learn and participate

[09:30] Why transcripts, captions, and multiple learning formats benefit everyone

[13:50] The problem with putting accessibility behind a paywall

[17:45] Three questions every course creator and community leader should ask

[21:20] How offering multiple ways to participate strengthens belonging

[25:00] Why accessibility is ultimately an act of care

Resources & Mentions

• Episode 026 – Interview with Dr. Catrina Mitchum

Meet Your Host

Tonya Kubo is a community strategist, marketing consultant, and rebel with a cause: helping people find the place where they truly belong. For nearly two decades, she’s built online spaces that feel less like comment sections and more like chosen family. She’s the fixer you call when your Facebook group has gone straight-up Lord of the Flies and the bouncer at the door of internet nonsense. As the host of Find Your Freaks, Tonya brings together unconventional thinkers and bridge-builders who know “normal” was never the point. Her favorite spaces? The ones where the freak flags fly high.

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What’s Next

Next time, Tonya sits down with Alicia Shidler to explore what it means to live with radical intention. Together, they unpack choosing purpose over expectations, building a life anchored in what matters most, and why being a good parent doesn’t mean losing yourself along the way.

Sometimes the most accessible thing to do is just offering multiple ways to participate. Talk it out, write it out, doodle it. That's the piece that reduces the cognitive load and gives more people points of entry to engage fully.

It's lowering the barrier to access. And that is what accessibility is, right? It's care. It's caring enough about the other person to make sure that they get the full benefit of the experience.

It's how you show somebody, your customer, your client, you know what, I was thinking about you before you ever walked in this room, before you ever gave me any money. I was thinking about you and what way to make this the best possible experience you could have, the best possible investment of your dollars. And that is what sets the stage for belonging.

We're wired for connection, but most of us are faking it to fit in. I'm Tanya Kubo and this is Find Your Freaks, the podcast that flips the script and spotlights the quirks you thought you had to keep quiet. Subscribe now and head to findyourfreaks.com for show notes and extras.

Because around here, what makes you weird makes you wonderful. Normal was never the point. Hey there freaks, Tanya here.

In my conversation with Dr. Katrina Mitchum, one line jumped out at me. Accessibility isn't an add-on, it is the foundation of belonging. And the more I sit with that, the more I realize that it actually applies far beyond online courses.

I mean that is Katrina's area of specialty and that is what we spent a majority of our time talking about during the last episode. But even though accessibility online tends to get reduced to captions and transcripts, which matter, Katrina gave us another frame which I think is equally important and maybe even more so. And that is cognitive load.

Accessibility is about removing unnecessary friction so people can actually participate. Now this doesn't just make life easier for people with disabilities. The thing that Katrina said that keeps sticking with me is it makes things easier for everyone.

And I think if you don't already see that, I hope kind of by the end of this conversation that you'll see some signs in your own life about how making life easier for people with disabilities makes life easier for everyone involved. And like I said earlier, it goes way beyond the internet. Think about an in-person event where the only chairs available have arms, okay? You may not think that's that big of a deal, but the fact is is chairs with arms only accommodate a certain body size, right? Or they only accommodate up to a certain body size.

So if you were somebody who lives in a larger body compared to the norm, or at least who chair manufacturers consider the norm, you walk into a room and you see chairs with arms and the first thing you've got to think about is is that going to fit or not? Second thing is do I want to risk it in public with everybody else or not? And then third, you know, if the answer is, yeah, I'll risk it, then you go try it out and maybe experience physical pain, maybe experience embarrassment if it doesn't work out for you. Or if you say it's not worth risking it, then the next thing you're doing is surveying the room looking for where to sit. Like what makes sense? What is the appropriate seating that gives you access to the speaker, access to what's going on, but also allows you to sit comfortably? Okay, that is one example of the mental load experienced by people when they enter a space that hasn't thought of them in advance.

Another example would be, you know, a workshop that pairs attendees up for discussion and doesn't actually think about whether that structure supports the goal. Because the reason it's important to not just do activities for the sake of doing activity is like, oh, we'll just have them pair up here. That'll be a great way to cut time in the agenda, or that'll be a great way to fill time in the agenda.

If that peer-to-peer sharing structure doesn't support the goal of the lesson or the goal of the workshop, then if you're trying to do a hybrid event, where you want to replicate that, your instinct may be, okay, well, we'll just put people in breakout rooms, you know, we'll pair them off in breakout rooms. But if there's no purpose or goal to the pairing off, then it's going to be really hard for you to ensure that you are achieving the goal that people are getting the maximum experience when you pair them off into breakout rooms. Because the thing that we don't think about in an in-person space versus an online space is when you're running an in-person event and you pair your folks off, you actually have eyes on everybody in the room, right? So you can see when the conversation starts to dull.

So you know if, okay, well, I was going to give them 15 minutes, but they don't actually have enough to say. I can tell by walking around the room that people are just chit-chatting now because they're done with the exercise. So you can say, okay, it sounds like everybody in the room is done, it's eight minutes, we'll move on.

But when you pair people off in breakout rooms on a Zoom call or, you know, Google Meet or whatever, you don't actually have the privilege of hearing their conversations. So room one may be deep in the conversation, while room two never did the exercise to begin with, and you wouldn't have any idea about that. So that's why it's so important to really be thinking about every aspect of an event, whether it's your an online course or it is a workshop or some other, you know, even a meeting, really making sure that you have a goal in mind behind each of the activities so that you can reverse engineer the best way to achieve the goal, but then also you can test each activity in terms of figuring out, is this actually as effective in achieving the goal as I thought it would be? Because when you don't do that, then you run the risk of excluding people rather than inviting them in.

In the case of breakout rooms, right, if everybody in the online space takes that opportunity to go get a drink of water to have a restroom break, then they come back into the main group. Nobody has had the benefit of that unpacking of the material in a peer-to-peer situation. So along those lines, what I want to unpack today are kind of two threads from the conversation, or let's just say we'll pull two threads from the conversation.

The first, because I think, you know, we've come a long way since the pandemic, but we're not all the way there yet, I do want to address the ethics of charging premiums for basic access, especially, you know, transcripts, captions, recordings, things like that. And then I also want to address the broader frame of accessibility online and in person, and the that this broader frame is really about care, it's about belonging, and it's about building communities that don't leave core people behind. So when Katrina was talking about cognitive load, you know, I have to say, it's one of those things that I've done a lot of work around cognitive load because I live in a neurodiverse household, so I'm always looking at how to reduce the mental load of the people who live with me, the mental load of myself, because it's hard to operate as everybody's executive function.

And so decision fatigue, mental load is big. It's something that we have dealt with historically in Clutter-Free Academy, because we find that a lot of times people get overwhelmed, and their house gets out of hand, simply because by the end of the day, they're just tired of making decisions, right? There's just too much going on in their head. And so when Katrina is talking about the lens of cognitive load, which she helped me to appreciate, at least, is that when we're talking about accessibility, it's not just a question of can someone technically see the information? Can someone technically hear the information? It's also about how easy is it for them to take the information in? How easy is it for them to make sense of the information, make sense of what I'm asking them to do? And how easy is it for them to use it and apply it in their day-to-day lives, right? Because there's no education if there's not an ability.

You can't say you learned something if you don't walk away with an ability to implement what you've learned and apply what you've learned, right? Then it's not learning. It's just reading. It's just information collection.

But in order to learn, you've got to be able to make different decisions or do things differently as a result of this knowledge that you've gained. And so thinking of a course, for instance, you've got a course. And again, we don't see this so much nowadays, but we used to see it a lot before the pandemic, right? 10 hours of video, but no transcripts.

And for someone who processes information better by reading, that's overwhelming. For somebody who needs to hear an instruction multiple times, they would have to watch the video over and over and over again, or watch a portion of the video, pause it, implement, or do whatever exercise they need to do, restart it, potentially rewatch that section again, and keep going, right? It would just be so overwhelming to have to go through that material over and over and over again. Whereas if they're given a transcript, they can follow along and they can make a note on where they leave off, they can go and do their exercise, and then they can pick the information back up much faster than starting and stopping a video and replaying and replaying and replaying.

Parents who listen with kids around, there are people who need to access information online, especially like DIY or self-study courses in busy locations. Maybe the most quiet scenario is they're in a public library, but a lot of times they're in a cafe, or they're watching their kids practice, or maybe they're in a dorm, right, with roommates and such. And so there's all these folks around, it may not be easy for them to listen.

Maybe they have earbuds, maybe they have headphones, maybe they don't. But even like captions may not be enough for them if they're finding themselves having to look away from the screen. But being able to skim a transcript again is a way where they can get that information fast, they can get that information effectively, and then they can do what they're being asked to do without having to sit through five minutes of video, 10 minutes of video, whatever it may take.

You know, we see the same thing, I'll probably never not mention neurodivergence or neurodiversity in any episode because it's so much a part of my day-to-day life. But you know, for individuals who are neurodivergent, many of them need to understand the why behind the what in order to do the thing correctly, otherwise they're going to overthink it. You told me to write my name on the line, but when you say write my name on the line, do you mean like all of the letters need to sit on the line? You know, in my case my name's Tanya, like does the bottom of my Y have to sit on the line? Like to you, you may be laughing and thinking that's a ridiculous example, but that's a real life concern that held up my eldest daughter from being able to write her first name on an assignment for years because she couldn't figure out where the bottom of the Y was supposed to go in her first name.

But if you give individuals the what behind the why or the why behind the what, that enables them to take much quicker action on the information that you're asking them to take action on. And the best part of all of this is that when you lower the cognitive load for one person, you lower it for everyone. When you tell me, hey, when I say write your name on the line, what I'm actually asking you to do is have, you know, most of the letters sitting on that line or somewhere above the line, but you know, your Ys and your Gs and your Qs, those drop underneath the line.

It's just kind of a guide so you can write your name straight and it'll also help you write your name in a way that's easier for me to read. Well, now I understand I probably would have written my name on the line like you expected anyway, but now I fully understand what the purpose is behind that and now I can meet your expectations better and I don't have to worry about if I'm doing things the right way or not. Captions help people who are deaf and hard of hearing consume content that is delivered via video or verbally, but they also help people in noisy environments.

They also help people who have a difficult time processing information that they hear. You know, a transcript will help a blind student who uses a screen reader to access information, but you know what? It also helps those of us who are Gen X and Goonies generation who learned to read at a young age and had to read everything that we read way faster than anybody can talk and we find ourselves frustrated at having to consume a ton of video content because of the amount of time it takes, right? Because I can understand some people at 2x speed, but I can't understand everybody at 2x speed and I read a lot faster than 2x speed of most videos and I retain stuff that I read much better than I retain information that I have seen somebody deliver. Now, if it's an over-the-shoulder tutorial, that's a totally different story for me and it's a totally different story for a lot of people.

The main thing is that, you know, accessibility isn't extra credit. It probably never was, but it surely isn't now. Accessibility isn't extra credit.

It's the baseline that we all need to be searching for if we truly want to create spaces of belonging. Now, again, right, I'm kind of dating myself here and I think a lot of people listening will be like, Tanya, that's not even a thing anymore, but the fact is it is still a thing. If it wasn't still a thing, if I wasn't still seeing it, I wouldn't still be talking about it.

And I know that if I'm still seeing this happen, it's happening way more often than it should be, which is people putting tools for accessibility behind paywalls. Oh, that burns me up. And what I mean is this used to happen a lot in the podcast space.

It doesn't happen so much anymore, but I still see it happen, right, where you need to be some kind of financial supporter to get access to transcripts. You need to be a financial supporter if you want a captioned video versus a non-captioned video. Now, this is where social media and technology is our friend because so often now, if something's on YouTube, it's almost always automatically captioned.

If something's on Facebook or Instagram, depending on your user settings, it can almost always be automatically captioned. Sometimes it's frustrating because the creator puts captions on the video and then the platform's captions goes over the creator's captions, but at least everybody's trying, right? It's a little frustrating, but at least everybody's trying. And when we see this with Summits, and Summits are a little different, I think it's a little bit different when it's like everybody can get it this way for free, but if you want the luxury of watching things on your own time or getting this time-sensitive content or this limited-term content, if you want access to that on demand, then that's a paid benefit.

And that's a little bit different just because the content expires for everyone after a certain point in time. Now, my preference on Summits and the Summits that I prefer to participate in are ones that during that limited time period where everything is free, I prefer Summits that all the videos during that free period are captioned just like they would be with on-demand access and transcripts are made available. Now, I know that for some people, they'll say, well, if the transcripts are made available, people can print those out.

And then, you know, there's no reason for anybody to pay for the all-access pass. I would argue if the only benefit to the all-access pass is being able to print out a transcript, there's probably not a lot of value to your all-access pass. Maybe it should have some other value.

So that's just, it's like one of those things where it was never okay. It's never been okay to force people to pay a premium price to have the same experience as people who don't share their disability. But it's really unacceptable now that we have technology that is free or ridiculously low cost that makes it so easy for us.

And the reason that I'm talking about this is because I think there's probably other instances that are similar to this enough that you may be able to draw some parallels that I might not even be thinking about well enough to be able to mention explicitly. But charging people for access to access content or an experience the same as a non-disabled peer is the same as saying you can be part of this community, but only if you fit these specific criteria, right? You can only be part of this community if you already can hear well, already can see well, process information quickly in real time. And, you know, you wouldn't put a sign up like on the door of a meeting room that says, you know, do not enter if you are deaf, hard of hearing, visually impaired, or struggle with cognitive processing, have a sensory processing disorder, an auditory processing disorder.

You would never do that. Because if you were to do that, I mean, you'd be holding an event where worth one-third of your attendees could not participate, right? You know, if you've got one-third of the U.S. population has some form of a disability, by charging a premium for basic access is saying, you know what, sorry that you paid for that conference, but you're just going to be watching Lipsmooth unless you pay a premium to get that headset that will, or that video monitor that will give you captions. It's so much easier, I think, and this is part of why I invited Katrina onto the show, is that it's so much easier to see that it's exclusionary and discriminatory in an in-person environment.

It's a lot harder to see online, but we still have to hold ourselves to the same standards. In conversation with Katrina, one of the things that, you know, she kept talking about is just designing for the intended experience, for the goal, for what the person's going to get out of it. And that's a powerful reframe for any course creator, group program creator, even if you are building a community online or in-person, right? Thinking about, because I think oftentimes what we do, and especially this time of year, you know, it's online course season, right? Everybody's selling a course or a program, and many of those courses and programs will be selling you on a method or a process for creating your own online course or online program.

And so many times, you know, they'll be focused on how to validate the idea, how to create a program that is worth the amount of money that you want to charge that fits your financial goals, right? It's all about your goal as a business owner, and your goal as a business owner is very important. You need to build the business that you want to run. I do not disagree.

But when you are creating these online education experiences, if you're not designing them with your student or your participant in mind, you are setting yourself and them up for failure. And so just like if you were to have a lecture, invite everybody to a lecture, you would want to make sure that that room was easy to access. You wouldn't want that room to be on the fifth floor with no elevator, because there are so many people who could not climb five flights of stairs, right? There's ages, life circumstances, somebody just had an ACL repair, they would have a very difficult time climbing five flights of stairs.

So you wouldn't want to do that. You want to be thinking the same way about everything that you produce. So really going back to thinking, number one, when we're talking about accessibility, when we're bringing it beyond transcripts, captions, recordings, being able to speed up, slow down, pause, all of that sort of stuff with our technology, just think about, one, what is the goal, right? Like not just what is the goal of the whole program, what's the goal of this specific lesson? What does success look like? My student will have succeeded if by the end of the lesson they can.

It's a program learning outcome, right? So what is the goal? And then think about after you're done with the goal and, you know, defining what success looks like, just think about who might be left out. Based on everything I've written down here, who might be left out? It might be like, oh, somebody may be left out if they are brand new to online business. If they don't have offer market fit already solidified or already validated, they're probably going to be left out of this exercise because it depends on them having that.

Or it may simply be, well, this actually really only works if they're a service provider or if they're interested in being a service provider. This would not work for a product-based business. This may not work for somebody who is using a Chromebook, right? Because the technology that they're going to need in order to do this is going to be a lot more high power than a Chromebook can support.

Or this may not work for somebody who only has access to a phone, doesn't even have a laptop or desktop computer. So you think about what is the goal, who might be left out according to how you're currently designing it, and then what small changes could make this easier for everyone. Now, in some of these cases, let's just say you're like, oh, this is actually better for service providers than product-based businesses.

Well, then you just write that into your marketing, right? You just make it upfront and honest. This is a program for service-based businesses. This is not a program for product-based businesses.

Easy. But if you do want it to be open to the both of them, then you need to think about how do I make my content accessible to both business models? One thing Katrina talked about is using a variety of examples and giving your students a variety of options on how they can participate in the activity. And this goes more back to the ability argument on accessibility, which is, you know, you can turn it in by giving me a voice note, writing it down.

You can record a video. You can draw a picture. But when you're thinking about what small changes could make this easier for everyone, realize that some changes you might think are too small actually are exactly what they need.

So kind of just to recap there, right? So building in that accessibility, no matter what it is, is going, what is the goal? Who might be left out? What small changes could make this easier for everyone? And then just recognizing that sometimes the most accessible thing to do is just offering multiple ways to participate. Like I said, talk it out, write it out, doodle it. That's the piece that reduces the cognitive load and gives more people points of entry to engage fully, right? It's lowering the barrier to access.

And that is what accessibility is, right? It's care. It's caring enough about the other person to make sure that they get the full benefit of the course, the lesson, the workshop, the experience. It's how you show somebody, your customer, your client, you know what? I was thinking about you before you ever walked in this room, before you ever gave me any money.

I was thinking about you and what way to make this the best possible experience you could have, the best possible investment of your dollars. And that is what sets the stage for belonging. It isn't paying a human to hand type your dictation when you can have Zoom for free, transcribe everything, and then you can just spend some time cleaning it up.

It's making people feel considered because when people feel considered, they feel connected. When they feel connected, they stay, they contribute, they thrive, and they pay it forward. Community without access isn't community.

And like I've been saying, and like Katrina said, access isn't just about ramps or captions. It's about making that path easier, lowering the cognitive load, and designing spaces where people can succeed no matter what background they had before they came to the table. So sometimes that can look like including transcripts with every video or every audio track that you produce, like we do here with this specific podcast.

Sometimes it's explaining the why, the reason behind the activity before you ask people to devote time, energy, and resources in doing the activity. Sometimes in an in-person environment, it is as simple as swapping out chairs or rethinking how you facilitate small group discussions. Listen to Katrina's interview and you got nothing else out of this.

I hope what you realize is the point is not perfection. It's intention. There is always going to be more that you could do if you had more information, if you had more resources, if you had this.

It's not about perfection. It's about intention because one step at a time, you can remove one barrier at a time, you can open one door at a time, and you're making a constant step forward toward improvement. So what I want you to be thinking about today is in all the spaces that you lead, in all of the spaces where you have some measure of control over the environment or the delivery, online or in person, ask yourself, who still can't get in here? Who is here but unable to fully participate? And then take just one action to change that, to better serve the people who are already there or to open the door to more people who should be there but don't quite have a way in.

That's what belonging is, and belonging can't happen without access. That's it for this episode of Find Your Freaks. To help more weirdos find their way here, subscribe, rate, and leave a review.

And if you're craving connection, join the freak show at findyourfreaks.com. What makes you weird makes you wonderful. Normal was never the point.