In print materials, the display of information is fixed, permanent, one size fits all. In properly prepared digital materials, the display of the same information is malleable and can easily be changed or transformed into a different display, thus providing great opportunities to customize it. For example, a callout box of background information may be displayed in a different location, or enlarged, or emphasized by use of color, or deleted entirely. Such malleability provides many options for increasing the perceptual clarity and salience of information for a wide range of students, and adjustments for the preferences of others. While these customizations are difficult to make with print materials, they are commonly available automatically with digital materials.

Sound is a particularly effective way to convey the impact or "energetics" of information, which is why sound design is so important in movies and why the human voice is particularly effective in conveying emotion and significance. However, information conveyed solely through sound is not equally accessible to all students, and it is especially inaccessible for students with hearing disabilities, for students who need extra time to process information, or for students who have memory difficulties. To ensure that all students have equivalent access to learning, options should be available for any information, including emphasis, to be presented aurally.

Graphics, animation, or video is often the optimal way to present information, especially when the information is about the relationships between objects, actions, numbers, or events. But such visual representations are not equally accessible to all students, especially students with visual disabilities or those who are not familiar with the graphic conventions employed. To ensure that all students have equal access to that information, non-visual alternatives should be available that use other modalities, such as text, touch, or audition.

Text is a special case of visual information. Since text is a visual representation of spoken language, the transformation from text back into speech is among the most easily accomplished methods for increasing accessibility. The advantage of text over speech is its permanence, but providing text that is easily transformed into speech accomplishes that permanence without sacrificing the advantages of speech. Digital synthetic text to speech is increasingly effective but still disappoints in the ability to carry the valuable information in prosody.

The semantic elements through which information is presented—the words, symbols, and icons—are differentially accessible to students with varying backgrounds, languages, lexical knowledge, and disabilities. To ensure accessibility for all, key vocabulary, labels, icons, and symbols should be linked to, or associated with, alternate representations of their meaning (e.g., an embedded glossary or definition, a graphic equivalent). Idioms, archaic expressions, culturally exclusive phrases, and slang should be translated.

Single elements of meaning (like words or numbers) can be combined to make new meanings. Those new meanings, however, depend on students' understanding the rules or structures (like syntax in a sentence or the conventions of a formula) with which those elements are combined. When the syntax of a sentence or the structure of a graphic presentation is not obvious or familiar to students, intelligibility suffers. To ensure that all students have equal access to information, provide alternative representations that clarify, or make more explicit, the syntactic or structural relationships between elements of meaning.

The ability to fluently decode words, numbers, or symbols that have been presented in an encoded format (e.g., visual symbols for text, haptic symbols for braille, algebraic numbers for quantity) takes years of practice for any student, and some students never reach automaticity. That lack of fluency or automaticity greatly increases the cognitive load of decoding, thereby reducing the capacity to comprehend and process information. To ensure that all students have equal access to knowledge, at least when the ability to decode is not the focus of instruction, it is important to provide options that reduce the barriers that decoding raises for students who are unfamiliar or dysfluent with the symbols.

The language of curricular materials is usually monolingual, but the students in the classroom often are not. Especially for new learners of the dominant language (e.g., English in U.S. schools), the accessibility of information is greatly reduced when no linguistic alternatives are available to provide entry points for non-native speakers of the dominant language or students with limited English proficiency. Providing alternatives as an option, especially for key information or vocabulary, is an important aspect of accessibility.

Classroom materials are often dominated by information presented in text. But text is a weak format for presenting many concepts and for explicating most processes. Furthermore, text is a particularly weak form of presentation for students who have text- or language-related disabilities. Providing alternatives—especially illustrations, simulations, images, or interactive graphics—can make the information presented in text more comprehensible for any student and accessible for some who would find it completely inaccessible in text.

Information—facts, concepts, principles, or ideas—is more accessible and open to assimilation as knowledge when it is presented in a way that primes, activates, or provides any prerequisite knowledge. Differential barriers and inequities exist when some students lack the background knowledge that is critical to assimilating or using new information (e.g., knowing the rules that underlie math operations). Those barriers can be reduced when options are available that supply or activate relevant prior knowledge, or link elsewhere to the prerequisite information.

One of the big differences between experts and novices (including those with disabilities) in any domain is the facility with which they distinguish what is critical from what is unimportant or irrelevant. Because experts quickly recognize the most important features in information, they allocate their time efficiently, quickly identifying what is valuable and finding the right "hooks" with which to assimilate that most valuable information into existing knowledge. As a consequence, one of the most effective ways to make information more accessible is to provide explicit cues or prompts that help individuals attend to those features that matter most while avoiding those that matter least. Depending on the goal of the lesson, highlighting may emphasize (1) the critical features that distinguish one concept from another, (2) the "big ideas" that organize domains of information, (3) the relationships between disparate concepts and ideas, and (4) the relationships between new information and prior knowledge that make it possible to build networks and contexts in which the new information has meaning.

Successful transformation of information into useable knowledge often requires the application of mental strategies and skills for "processing" that information. These cognitive, or meta-cognitive, strategies involve the selection and manipulation of information so that it can be more effectively summarized, categorized, prioritized, contextualized, and remembered. While some students in any classroom may have a full repertoire of these strategies and the knowledge of when to apply them, most students do not. For those students who do not, one of the most beneficial interventions is to explicitly teach them those strategies and have them practice their appropriate use in context. Well-designed materials can provide customized and embedded models, scaffolds, and feedback to assist students who have very diverse abilities and disabilities in using those strategies effectively.

While each of the cognitive scaffolds described above is likely to enhance retention for some students, others have weaknesses or disabilities that will require explicit supports for memory and transfer in order to improve cognitive accessibility. Supports for memory and transfer include techniques that are designed to heighten the memorability of information, and those that prompt and guide students to employ explicit mnemonic strategies.