This article describes the importance of web page design that is accessible to all.  The authors include links to an Implementation Plan for Web Accessibility and Web Content Accessibility Guidelines and offer a website accessibility checklist.  

These accessibility guides and resources will help higher ed. faculty create more accessible learning environments.  The checklists will guide users toward implementing greater accessibility when preparing or revising courses.   

The UDL Syllabus Rubric is a tool that can be implemented as part of a self-discovery related to course design and effectiveness.

Individual Implementation:
One can simply select a course syllabus and analyze it according to the rubric elements and respective rating categories.  For each element, there is also a Notes field that serves as a place to record why a particular rating was given on a UDL syllabus element.  By doing so, the in-the-moment information is documented.  In addition to better retaining the information, prompts can be embedded, which serve as low-stakes self-contracts or reference points for future areas of syllabus refinement.

Group Implementation:
The preferred method for using the UDL Syllabus Rubric is via in-depth, Faculty Learning Community process.  This allows for simultaneous self-reflection and peer-input.  In addition, the FLC process is often interdisciplinary, which helps reconsider from a different lens how to represent course material, engage students, or assess their expression of learning.

The UDL Syllabus Rubric is often used by one faculty member to evaluate and give input to another.  However, it is important to first establish an atmosphere of mutual respect and trust.  Once this is done, faculty members are often more open to input by their peers.  Once a faculty member receives input via peer-dialog and rubric documentation, that faculty member explores which changes are reasonable and what steps it may take.  Often, the changes might be adding additional syllabus information to a specific section or simply reformatting a particular element.  Importantly, FLC dialog often leads to further UDL-based course changes and reflections that benefit all participants.

Article describes the UDL principle of Expression in some detail, along a with link to the CAST UDL Guidelines.  A link to UDL Case Studies at the higher ed. level is included, as well as a UDL: Expression Takeaway Strategies. 

Affect represents a crucial element to learning, and learners differ markedly in the ways in which they can be engaged or motivated to learn. There are a variety of sources that can influence individual variation in affect including neurology, culture, personal relevance, subjectivity, and background knowledge, along with a variety of other factors presented in these guidelines. Some learners are highly engaged by spontaneity and novelty while other are disengaged, even frightened, by those aspects, preferring strict routine. Some learners might like to work alone, while others prefer to work with their peers. In reality, there is not one means of engagement that will be optimal for all learners in all contexts; providing multiple options for engagement is essential. For greater detail, please refer to the CAST UDL Guidelines on Engagement.

• Provide options for recruiting interest: Information that is not attended to, that does not engage learners’ cognition, is in fact inaccessible. It is inaccessible both in the moment and in the future, because relevant information goes unnoticed and unprocessed. As a result, teachers devote considerable effort to recruiting learner attention and engagement. But learners differ significantly in what attracts their attention and engages their interest. Even the same learner will differ over time and circumstance; their “interests” change as they develop and gain new knowledge and skills, as their biological environments change, and as they develop into self-determined adolescents and adults. It is, therefore, important to have alternative ways to recruit learner interest, ways that reflect the important inter- and intra-individual differences amongst learners.
• Provide options for sustaining effort and persistence: Many kinds of learning, particularly the learning of skills and strategies, require sustained attention and effort. When motivated to do so, many learners can regulate their attention and affect in order to sustain the effort and concentration that such learning will require. However, learners differ considerably in their ability to self-regulate in this way. Their differences reflect disparities in their initial motivation, their capacity and skills for self-regulation, their susceptibility to contextual interference, and so forth. A key instructional goal is to build the individual skills in self-regulation and self-determination that will equalize such learning opportunities (see Guideline 9). In the meantime, the external environment must provide options that can equalize accessibility by supporting learners who differ in initial motivation, self-regulation skills, etc.
• Provide options for self-regulation: While it is important to design the extrinsic environment so that it can support motivation and engagement (see Guidelines 7 and 8), it is also important to develop learners’ intrinsic abilities to regulate their own emotions and motivations. The ability to self-regulate – to strategically modulate one’s emotional reactions or states in order to be more effective at coping and engaging with the environment – is a critical aspect of human development. While many individuals develop self-regulatory skills on their own, either by trial and error or by observing successful adults, many others have significant difficulties in developing these skills. Unfortunately some classrooms do not address these skills explicitly, leaving them as part of the “implicit” curriculum that is often inaccessible or invisible to many. Those teachers and settings that address self-regulation explicitly will be most successful in applying the UDL principles through modeling and prompting in a variety of methods. As in other kinds of learning, individual differences are more likely than uniformity. A successful approach requires providing sufficient alternatives to support learners with very different aptitudes and prior experience to effectively manage their own engagement and affect.

This article highlights the elements of Representation including providing options for perception, language, mathmatical expressions and symbols, provides a link to case studies in Representation and a graphic organizer take away strategy.   

UDL is an educational framework based on research in the learning sciences that guides the development of flexible learning environments that can accommodate individual learning differences[1].

Recognizing that the way individuals learn can be unique, the UDL framework, first defined by the Center for Applied Special Technology (CAST) in the 1990s[1], calls for creating curriculum from the outset that provides:

• Multiple means of representation to give learners various ways of acquiring information and knowledge,
• Multiple means of engagement to tap into learners' interests, challenge them appropriately, and motivate them to learn[3][4].
• Multiple means of expression to provide learners alternatives for demonstrating what they know, and

Curriculum, as defined in the UDL literature, has four parts: instructional goals, methods, materials, and assessments[5]. UDL is intended to increase access to learning by reducing physical, cognitive, intellectual, and organizational barriers to learning, as well as other obstacles.

The concept and language of UDL was inspired by the universal design movement in architecture and product development, originally formulated by Ronald L. Mace at North Carolina State University[5]. Universal design calls for designing and constructing buildings, homes, products, and so forth that, from the outset, accommodate the widest spectrum of users[8]. UDL applies this general idea to learning: that curriculum should from the outset be designed to accommodate all kinds of learners[9].

However, recognizing that the UD principles created to guide the design of things (e.g., buildings, products) are not adequate for the design of social interactions (e.g.,  learning situations), researchers at CAST looked to the neurosciences and theories of progressive education in developing the UDL principles[10]. In particular, the work of Lev Vygotsky and, less directly, Benjamin Bloom informed the three-part UDL framework[11].

Wikipedia (Aug 23, 2011). Retrieved from http://en.Wikipedia.org/wiki/universal_design_for_learning.

UDL has its roots in Universal Design, a term coined by Ronald L. Mace (North Carolina State University) in 1972, as a way to describe the concept of designing all products and the built environment to be aesthetic and usable to the greatest extent possible by everyone, regardless of their age, ability, or status in life.