Spotlight on Accessibility: New on BrainPOP and BrainPOP Jr.

Corie Miller
Sep 14, 2022
2 min read

Moby the orange robot holding megaphone with exclamation mark above, set against a colorful background. Text reads "What's New?" with bold colors and dots.

At BrainPOP, we believe in creating accessible, equitable features and products that engage, excite, and challenge kids in every way they learn. This fall, we are launching a suite of new accessibility-focused features embedded in BrainPOP topic pages to meet the needs of all students:

New! Embedded audio descriptions
Coming in January 2023! Multilingual Movie Player for Spanish and French translations
Coming soon! Microsoft Immersive Reader integration for BrainPOP Jr. (grades K–3)

NEW! Embedded Audio Descriptions

Audio descriptions are now available in BrainPOP (grades 3–8) movies. This new feature allows learners to experience every BrainPOP movie through multiple modalities, which is especially critical for students with low vision, visual impairment, visual processing difficulties, or blindness.

When movies have audio descriptions enabled, they provide added narration to the audio soundtrack to describe important visual details (about actions, characters, scene changes, on-screen text, and other visual content) that cannot be understood from the main soundtrack alone.

You can enable audio descriptions in a BrainPOP movie by clicking the Settings icon in the movie player. Audio descriptions will extend the movie’s length, since it is edited and paused at specific moments to add the audio description.

Note: Pause Points and audio descriptions cannot be enabled simultaneously.

Illustration of diverse people in hats against U.S. flag background. Video controls with "Audio Description On" highlighted.

COMING IN JANUARY 2023! Multilingual Movie Player for Spanish and French Translations

With our forthcoming Multilingual Movie Player, your favorite BrainPOP (grades 3–8) movies will soon be available in Spanish and French. Complete movie translations (including audio and closed captions) will strengthen BrainPOP’s learning support for English language learners (ELLs), enabling them to build background knowledge across content areas as they learn English.

Spanish and French translations will soon be accessible by clicking “Ver en Español” or “Voir en français” beneath the movie player.

Cartoon battle scene in a forest; colonial soldiers firing muskets at red-coated troops. Greenery in background, text options in Spanish and French.

COMING SOON! Microsoft Immersive Reader (MIR) for Young Readers

Last fall, we launched the Microsoft Immersive Reader integration for BrainPOP (grades 3–8), and we’re bringing it to BrainPOP Jr.! Integrating MIR into our Easy and Hard Quizzes will support our emerging readers and improve BrainPOP’s accessibility for all students. It will give young readers access to MIR’s literacy-building tools like Line Focus, Text Personalization, Grammar Options, Read Aloud, Picture Dictionary, and Translation into over 45 languages.