Why 5-Minute Video Lectures Took Me 30 Minutes as a Blind Student
A workflow that gave me back the part of learning I didn’t realize I’d lost.
If you’re a blind student, especially a blind college student taking online classes with lots of video lectures, I found a workflow that genuinely saved me hours of frustration and let me focus more on actually learning the material.
Now you may be asking: “Do you not have a Braille display or Braille notetaker?”
The answer is yes. I have a BrailleSense 6 Mini, and I absolutely love it. It’s my everyday companion, not just for school, but in my personal life too. I’m also a pretty fast Braille typist. The problem was never Braille itself.
The problem was the workflow.
A five minute lecture video could easily turn into thirty minutes or more because I was constantly pausing every minute to jot down a definition, key term, or important concept. Then I would rewind because I missed the next sentence while typing. Then pause again. Then rewind again.
Instead of focusing on understanding the lecture itself, my brain was juggling listening, typing, remembering, rewinding, and trying not to miss the next important detail.
It was exhausting.
The Workflow and How I Found It
Last year, I took a course called Cloud Foundations with AWS (Amazon Web Services). It ended up becoming one of the most enjoyable classes I had taken in a long time. I learned the foundations of cloud computing, worked with real AWS services, and got hands-on labs through the actual AWS console. I got to tinker!
That experience honestly deserves its own article someday.
When I first logged into AWS Academy through Canvas, I looked at the week’s module and noticed several lecture videos that were each around five minutes long. I pulled out my trusty BrailleSense 6 Mini, opened Notepad, and started taking notes while the second lecture played.
Very quickly, I realized this was not going to work long-term.
I was constantly stopping the video just to write down terms and concepts, and before I knew it, one short lecture had eaten up nearly half an hour. The frustrating part was that I actually enjoyed the content. I wanted to focus on learning, not on fighting the mechanics of note taking.
So I started experimenting.
I already had an app on my iPhone called Just Press Record, which is my preferred voice recording app. The built-in Voice Memos app on iPhone would work perfectly too. At first, I checked to see whether I could simply download the lecture videos directly from Canvas, but they were embedded into the course platform, so that option was out.
Instead, I used Just Press Record to capture the lecture audio while I listened naturally to the videos. Suddenly, I wasn’t splitting my focus between learning and documenting every single detail. The recording process faded into the background while I focused on understanding the concepts being taught.
That alone was a huge relief.
Then I remembered a relatively new AI tool from Google that had just started getting attention at the time: Google NotebookLM.
NotebookLM Became My Study Buddy
NotebookLM is a website and app where you can upload various types of resources. I used my audio recordings, and interact with them using Google’s Gemini AI. What makes it especially interesting is that the AI stays grounded in what you give it, rather than pulling from across the internet.
I uploaded my lecture recordings from Just Press Record into NotebookLM, and almost immediately it generated summaries of the material. But the summaries were honestly just the beginning.
I could ask follow-up questions like:
“What does EC2 actually do?” or “Can you explain Identity and Access Management again?”
As someone who learns well through audio and conversation, this felt far more natural than repeatedly scrubbing through lecture videos trying to relocate one specific explanation.
One of my favorite features was Audio Overviews, where NotebookLM generates a kind of AI-hosted podcast discussion based on your uploaded sources. Hearing concepts discussed conversationally helped reinforce the material in a way that felt engaging instead of overwhelming.
And yes, I absolutely stress tested it.
Our quizzes allowed two attempts, and Canvas kept the higher score. I always took the quizzes myself first because I genuinely wanted to test my own understanding of the material. Afterward, I started experimenting with NotebookLM to see how well it actually understood the lectures and concepts.
Honestly? It performed shockingly well.
Out of all the quizzes in the course, I only remember one question really tripping it up, and I honestly think the wording confused it more than the concept itself. That experience also reminded me not to blindly trust AI outputs. NotebookLM was an incredibly useful study companion, but I still verified information myself and treated it as reinforcement rather than replacement.
And clearly, I learned something, because to this day I still remember that IAM stands for Identity and Access Management and that VPCs need subnets to function properly.
You do not remember cloud networking concepts years later by accident.
Accessibility Is Also About Energy
What surprised me most about this workflow was not that it made things faster. It was that it made learning enjoyable again.
Blind students often experience video and audio content linearly. Sighted students can glance back at a slide or quickly skim visual information, but for blind students, reviewing information often means stopping, rewinding, replaying, and mentally holding multiple things at once.
That cognitive load adds up fast.
This workflow reduced enough friction that I could finally focus on understanding instead of transcription. Instead of using all my mental energy trying to capture every word, I could engage with the ideas themselves.
And because of that, I ended up doing really well in the hands-on AWS labs. I wasn’t sure what to expect accessibility-wise going in, but the console held up. I could follow the lab instructions, navigate the interface, configure services, and experiment with real cloud infrastructure.
That was the fun part.
Nobody tells you that being a blind student sometimes means spending more energy on access than on understanding. That the real barrier isn’t the content, it’s the friction standing between you and it. And if you’ve ever felt that exhaustion, I want you to know it’s real. It’s not a you problem. This workflow didn’t eliminate that friction. But it reduced it enough to remind me why I wanted to learn in the first place. For the first time in a while, I wasn’t just trying to survive a class. I was actually enjoying learning again.