Online and blended teaching strips away the cues a physical classroom relies on, the raised hand, the student quietly falling behind, while introducing barriers a physical room never had: uncaptioned recordings, unlabelled links, forums that assume everyone keeps the same rhythm. Practice Note 10 carries the Universal Design for Learning principles of Note 9 into digital environments, where the same intention takes a different shape.
The note works through three core ideas. Navigation is part of the content: a course site students cannot predict is a barrier before teaching begins. Captions and transcripts are universal, not individual, benefiting second-language students, commuters, and fast readers, not only d/Deaf viewers. Multimedia feedback extends reach, but only when it is itself accessible, because a recording without a transcript quietly excludes the students it was meant to include.
Grounded in CAST’s UDL Guidelines, WCAG 2.2, and Tobin and Behling’s usable-by-one, usable-by-all logic, the note offers a five-step starting audit and a practical WCAG POUR check to run before publishing. A worked scenario shows how one structural redesign recovered a stalled asynchronous cohort without being built around any single student. Accessible design belongs to the person building the course, not only to the support service responding afterwards.
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