Students differ widely in their motor capacity and dexterity. To reduce barriers to learning that would be introduced by the differential motor demands of a particular task, provide alternative means for response, selection, and composition.

Students differ widely in their optimal means for navigating through information and activities. To provide equal opportunity for interaction with learning experiences, ensure that there are multiple means for navigating so that navigation and control are accessible to all students.

Significant numbers of students consistently use assistive technologies for navigation, interaction, and composition. It is critical that instructional technologies and curricula not impose inadvertent barriers to the use of these assistive technologies, which would interfere with instructional progress. An important design consideration, for example, is to ensure that there are keyboard commands for any mouse action so that students can use common assistive technologies that depend on those commands. It is also important, however, to ensure that making a lesson physically accessible does not inadvertently remove its challenge to learning. The goal is not to make answers physically accessible, but to make the learning that underlies those answers accessible.

Unless specific media and materials are critical to an objective (e.g., the objective is to learn to paint specifically with oils or to learn to handwrite with calligraphy), it is important to provide alternative media for expression. Such alternatives reduce media-specific barriers to expression among students with a variety of special needs but also increase the opportunities for all students to develop a wider palette of expression in a media-rich world. For example, it is important for all students to learn composition, not just writing, and to learn the optimal medium for any particular content of expression and audience.

There is a pervasive tendency in schooling to focus on traditional tools for literacy rather than on contemporary ones. This tendency has several liabilities: (1) it does not prepare students for their future; (2) it limits the range of content and teaching methodologies that can be implemented; and, most important, (3) it restricts the kinds of students who can be successful. Modern media tools provide a more flexible and accessible tool kit with which students who have a variety of abilities and disabilities can more successfully articulate what they know. Unless a lesson is focused on learning to use a specific tool (e.g., learning to draw with a compass), curricula should allow many alternatives. Like any craftsman, students should learn to use tools that are an optimal match between their abilities and the task demands.

Students who are developing a target skill often need multiple scaffolds and graduated supports to help them as they practice and develop independence. The same scaffolds that are important for any novice are often critical for students with disabilities in both practice and performance. Curricula should offer alternatives to the degree of freedom available, with highly scaffolded and supported opportunities (e.g., templates, physical and mnemonic scaffolds, procedural checklists, etc.) provided for some, followed by gradual release and wide degrees of freedom for those who are ready for independence.

When left on their own, most students—especially those who are immature or who have disabilities that affect executive function—set learning and performance goals for themselves that are inappropriate or unreachable. The most common remedy is to have adults set goals and objectives for them. That short-term remedy, however, does little to help any student develop new skills or strategies, and does even less to support students with executive function weaknesses. A UDL approach embeds graduated scaffolds for learning in order to set personal goals that are both challenging and realistic right in the curriculum.

Once a goal is set, effective learners and problem-solvers plan a strategy for reaching that goal. For young children in any domain, older students in a new domain, or any student with one of the disabilities that compromise executive functions (e.g., ADHD, ADD, autism spectrum disorders), the strategic planning step is often omitted and impulsive trial and error takes its place. To help students become more plan-oriented and strategic, a variety of options—cognitive "speed bumps" that prompt them to stop and think, graduated scaffolds that help them actually implement strategies, engagement in decision-making with competent mentors—are needed.

One limit of executive function is the one imposed by the limitations of so-called working memory. This "scratch pad" for maintaining chunks of information in immediate memory, where they can be accessed as part of comprehension and problem-solving, is very limited for any student and even more severely limited for many students with learning and cognitive disabilities. As a result, many such students seem disorganized, forgetful, unprepared. Wherever short-term memory capacity is not construct-relevant in a lesson, it is important to provide a variety of internal scaffolds and external organizational aids—exactly the kinds that executives use—to keep information organized and "in mind."

Many students seem relatively unresponsive to corrective feedback or knowledge of results. As a result, they seem "perseverative," careless, or unmotivated. For these students all of the time, and for most students some of the time, it is important to ensure that options can be customized to provide feedback that is explicit, timely, informative, and accessible (see representational Guidelines above and Guidelines for affective feedback). It is especially important to provide "formative" feedback that allows students to monitor their own progress effectively and to use that information to guide their own effort and practice.