Lectures can present barriers to learning for many students and although online multimedia materials have become technically easier to create and offer many benefits for learning and teaching, they can be difficult to access, manage, and exploit. This article considers how research on interacting with multimedia can inform developments in using automatically synchronised speech recognition (SR) captioning to: 1. facilitate the manipulation of digital multimedia resources; 2. support preferred learning and teaching styles and assist those who, for cognitive physical or sensory reasons, find note-taking difficult; and 3. caption speech for deaf learners or for any learner when speech is not available or suitable.