E-Learning Content Creation: Articulate 360, Adobe Captivate, Canva

Almost certainly not, because the thing that decides whether guidance material works is rarely the authoring tool. Articulate and Captivate earn their licence cost when you need branching scenarios, tracked completion across a large cohort and packaging for a formal learning platform. Most guidance content is a short explanation, a document someone can keep, and occasionally a video.

Before choosing a tool, decide what the material has to do. If it has to be findable again six months later, it needs to be a page or a file, not a module inside a platform login. If it has to be usable on a phone during a bus journey, a long interactive module is the wrong shape.

Where you should spend the effort is accessibility, because that is what decides how many people the material reaches. Captions on anything spoken, text that is real text rather than words baked into an image, enough colour contrast to read on a cracked screen in daylight, and a document that a screen reader can follow. WCAG is the yardstick, and it applies to what you author regardless of the tool.

Captions are the one we keep skipping because of time. Is auto-generated good enough, or does that defeat the point?

Auto-generated then corrected is fine and it is much faster than writing from scratch. Auto-generated and left alone is a gamble that gets worse exactly where it matters: names, place names, service names and numbers are what automatic captioning gets wrong, and those are the parts someone actually needs to write down.

Two things to add. Captions help far more people than those who cannot hear: anyone watching in a shared flat without headphones, anyone reading a second language who follows text better than speech, anyone on a bad connection. And a transcript underneath is worth as much as captions, because it can be searched, copied and translated, which a burned-in caption cannot.