Transforming Classrooms: UDL and Assistive Technology for Students with LDs and ADHD

Introduction

The Center for Applied Special Technology (CAST) Universal Design for Learning (UDL) framework has been a cornerstone of educator planning, particularly for those interested in designing learning environments that are accessible, flexible, and supportive of the variability of learners. The framework centres on the idea that all learners can access and participate in meaningful, challenging learning opportunities (CAST 2024). In the summer of 2024, CAST released UDL 3.0, which moves beyond a focus on simple access to a deeper emphasis on equity and justice in learning. The exchange between educator and learner is essential in this process, as educators design environments that recognize and respond to students’ diverse strengths and needs. Through assistive technology, students and educators can bridge barriers to access, supporting all students, including those with learning disabilities and ADHD. As we strive to create universally accessible learning spaces, particular attention must be paid to assistive tools that can support both educators and learners in the classroom. Students are placed at the centre of the revised guidelines, shifting our focus to recognize that students must be advocates, agents, and active participants in their learning. This work aligns with Ontario’s ongoing commitment to inclusive and accessible education.

Convergence of Practice

It’s important to note that concepts that underpin Universal Design for Learning are mirrored in many of the pre-colonial Indigenous learning structures that existed in Ontario and elsewhere across the continent. According to the Anishinabek Education System: Special Education Guideline, “learners need responsive programming that is balanced and addresses holistic needs: intellectual, emotional, physical, and spiritual. The learning relationship is reciprocal: both student and educator carry knowledge”  (Section 8.4). Similarly, UDL 3.0 centres the idea that all students can learn. The current version of UDL 3.0 parallels these teachings by emphasizing pedagogical approaches that plan for learners’ multiple and intersecting identities.

Building Student Agency through Improved Accessibility

According to the CAST UDL 3.0 guidelines, agency occurs when there is a mutual awareness of value and respect between educators and learners. When navigating learning environments, educators must identify and remove barriers, and students must be active in how they engage with the material. When we consider assistive technology as it relates to agency, students must first be aware of the tools and understand how to use them before they can be active in the process of learning and assessment. CAST identifies three key areas in which learning must be considered to boost student agency:

• Engagement: the ways in which educators design and prepare the learning environment for varied interests and “buy-in”. Among other factors, engagement promotes joy and play as central to the engagement process.
• Representation: the ways in which educators design learning environments that are flexible and responsive to the diversity of learners in terms of life experiences, culture, language, and learning strengths or needs.
• Action and Expression: the ways in which educators build environments that are accessible and responsive to the strengths and needs of students, with a broad understanding of communication and the expression of ideas.

Essential Assistive Technology Toolkit

When considering key assistive technology tools, the following list supports many of the strengths and needs that learners bring to learning spaces. Note that many tools listed below exist within a single program or within the built-in accessibility settings of device operating systems (OS).  Many of these tools and applications are included in licensing agreements available through schools and school districts, allowing staff and students to use them.

A Note about Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Assistive Technology

We cannot explore assistive technology without acknowledging artificial intelligence (AI) and its effect on student learning. Many assistive technology tools have begun to embed AI-enabled features, from digital assistants to spelling and grammar checkers. AI brings assistive technology into a new realm of responsiveness and personalized output. As educators of students with diverse interests, strengths, and needs, it is our responsibility to understand how AI is being used by students, and how educators can thoughtfully leverage its power to support student learning. As we explore the elements of UDL, some of the strategies and tools described below include AI-supported features that enhance access and participation in learning. The following examples highlight common assistive technology tools that can support student access, expression, and participation in learning.

Tool Type	What It Does	Sample Software/Application
Read Aloud (Text-to-Speech, “TTS”)	User selects text and the device reads it aloud	Chromebook “Select-to-Speak” Read&Write – TTS Speechify
Voice Typing (Speech-to-Text, “STT”)	User speaks and the device transcribes into text	Google Docs STT Otter.ai Read&Write – STT
Text Prediction	As the user types, the program will suggest the next word based on context or vocabulary on the site, as well as from the preceding words in the sentence.	Google Docs – Smart Compose On-screen keyboard Read&Write – Prediction
Text Recognition/ Scanning (Optical Character Recognition, “OCR”)	Turns unreadable files into readable documents	Adobe OCR Kami OrbitNote
PDF Annotation	Allows users to edit, adjust, and mark up PDF documents	DocHub Kami OrbitNote
Mind or Concept Mapping Software	Organizes the user’s thoughts visually with text and multimedia input	Mindmup Mindomo Miro
Math Expression Tools	Allows users to type mathematical phrases onto a document	Equatio Google Docs Equation Editor OneNote Math Assistant
Symbol Supported Expression	Provides a rich library of images to express concepts in a variety of activities and platforms	Boardmaker 7 Clicker 8 Widgit Online
Screen Reader	Scans and auditorily identifies elements of the screen to support navigation.	Apple VoiceOver (Mac) ChromeVox Microsoft Narrator
Live and Media Captioning	Captions audio, videos, or voice input from the user	Mac Live Captions Microsoft Live Captions Otter.ai
Language Building (translation, dictionary)	Defines, translates content within a document	Google Translate Immersive Reader Read&Write – Dictionary, Picture dictionary
Generative AI Chat	Answers questions and generates content (i.e., images, documents) based on user-created prompts	ChatGPT Google Gemini Microsoft Copilot
General Device Accessibility Settings	A suite of settings that users can adjust to activate many built-in accessibility features	Chromebook Accessibility Mac Accessibility Windows Accessibility
Accessible Text Repositories	Collections of diverse materials in a range of formats to support individuals with various perceptual needs.	AERO CELA Monarch Reader
Presentation Tools	A multimodal platform to design presentations through visuals, audio, and text.	Canva Google Slides MS PowerPoint

How Engagement Drives Learning

Students will enter classrooms with a range of experiences and identities that influence how they engage with the educator, their peers, and the content on any given day. In anticipation of this learner variability, educators should consider how to engage students meaningfully with flexible access points.

Welcoming Interests & Identities

Developing learning environments that consider individual student interests and identities can seem like a daunting task. Choosing materials that are broadly accessible, interesting, and identity-affirming can be challenging, especially if the materials are pre-selected before you have gotten to know students. As we work toward building inclusive and accessible classroom spaces, we can be strategic in how we leverage the features of common assistive technology tools already in use to support universally designed learning environments. Consider the learning management system (LMS) you use to support your class.  LMSs are the platforms on which the digital materials used during your class are held and accessed.  Think of Google Classroom or Brightspace as examples of an LMS. When creating these spaces, there are many ways to maximize the tools already built in to support accessibility for diverse interests and abilities. When paired with accompanying tools like Read&Write and OrbitNote, documents can be enhanced with text-to-speech, document annotation, and a host of display features to make the material more reflective of the students’ strengths and needs in that moment. For example, a student may choose to listen to the instructions on a particular day if they are trying to stay focused after a night of poor sleep.  Similarly, students can mark up an article being explored as a class using a PDF annotator rather than on a printed page because they forgot to bring writing utensils or a binder that day. Additionally, all assignments sent to students on Google Classroom allow the opportunity to upload additional documents in a range of formats, expanding opportunities for students to share what they know. Teachers and students can upload slide decks, links, videos, or other media to support and express understanding of content in a way that reflects students’ interests and identities.

Sustaining Effort & Persistence

An important aspect of engagement is the goal of student self-sustained effort and persistence with learning tasks.  Finding learning tasks and assessments that are “fun” can be stressful and, once devised, might only appeal to a small subset of the class (at times). Student engagement, through effort and persistence, can be boosted by employing tools that encourage a broad selection of media and input. Consider a mind-mapping tool. Mind maps help students organize their thinking into structured and coherent relationships between central ideas or themes and supporting details. Mind maps can demonstrate linear connections as well as interconnected webs that show relationships between concepts.  Mind maps can include a range of inputs such as images, videos, or audio files (linked or uploaded) and can work seamlessly with other assistive technologies to support student expression, such as text-to-speech or speech-to-text software.  Mind maps encourage students to explicitly make connections using mnemonics, image cues, or personally relevant content that enhances the salience of key ideas.  When paired with the strategy of memory aids and study tools, mind maps can provide a framework for students to remember concepts over a unit of study. Tools like Mindomo also allow users to convert mind maps into presentations or a text-based outline that can be used for other purposes. While many of these tools are intuitive in their design and functionality, educators play an important role in modeling their effective use.  The updated CAST UDL 3.0 guidelines highlight the importance of reciprocal learning, which can be especially helpful when using new digital tools. If educators demonstrate how a single mind map can function as a unit organizer, study guide, outline, and presentation, students can get a better sense of the various functions in action by a “lead learner.” Students can then take this learning and explore how the tools might work best for them individually, which may vary from how their peers choose to engage with it.  When we build in authentic opportunities for use, students can see the full range of the tool’s potential (including the patience required to troubleshoot inevitable roadblocks).  Showing students our own motivation to explore can inspire a similar persistence and effort that we hope to see in students as they navigate their own toolkit of assistive technology.

Emotional Capacity

As we strive to build engaging spaces, we must also consider the emotional and physical state in which students enter classrooms. We can’t presume that all students had a restorative sleep, a stress-free journey to school, or have an insatiable desire for learning.  As such, we should also consider how we might use our assistive technology toolkit to provide students with opportunities to support their emotional health and their awareness of their own physiological state. In our pursuit of the goals of UDL 3.0, we need to support students in their journey toward becoming independent agents in their own learning, and part of that resides in their ability to understand what they may need at any given moment. If we anticipate that some learners may not be excited to provide verbal responses in a minds-on or small group discussion (for whatever reason), we can plan our activities to include different entry points that rely on a range of expressive modes. Text-to-speech tools allow students to compose a response, and share their thinking aurally without having to speak at that moment.  Also, tools like Mote or VoiceNotes in Read&Write provide opportunities for students to share verbal feedback in documents so their voice is included, which can be done from a quiet or separate space.  Voice recording tools are also helpful for educators looking to expand their assessment options beyond written-only opportunities. Students can still meaningfully engage, but in a way that leverages their strengths in that moment. Educators can consider the role of learning management systems, calendars, and other scheduling/planning tools (including the lesson agenda on the board) as an effective dimension on which to support students’ emotional capacity.  When calendars are up-to-date and reflective of important topics with assessments made known to the class, students can prepare accordingly (mentally, physically, and emotionally).  Educators can also welcome input to capture any dates or events of student importance onto the class calendar.  Inviting student input transforms the calendar from being a unidirectional prescription of events to a resource that welcomes and honours the experiences of students, acknowledging their life outside of your class, and how both realms can coexist within the planning and pace of learning. Similarly, including a lesson agenda (presented digitally or on the board), students can manage their energy more effectively when they know what’s happening in the class. Students not only benefit from the structure created and maintained collectively, but they can also experience what effective planning looks, sounds, and feels like, as a model for their own future planning.

Try This in Your Classroom

• Identify one upcoming lesson and offer two different ways for students to engage (e.g., listen, read, or watch).
• Ask students how they prefer to access instructions and adjust one routine based on their feedback.
• Choose one tool (e.g., text-to-speech or annotation) and model its use during a lesson.

How Representation Drives Learning

CAST’s UDL 3.0 recognizes that the way students perceive and make meaning of information is deeply individualized. By designing with multiple means of representation, every student can see their unique way of knowing reflected in the curriculum, directly affirming their identity and value within the classroom. Effective use of assistive technology helps educators build accessible entry points by diversifying how content is represented, so that students see themselves reflected in the learning while also gaining a variety of ways to represent their own thinking.

Perception

Recognizing that every student brings a unique set of sensory strengths to the classroom, educators can provide the same information through multiple modalities, offering texts in print, audio, and digital forms. By leveraging alternative format libraries like AERO and CELA, alongside school board-licensed digital platforms and the extensive collections of public libraries, educators can provide a vast range of rich, flexible materials for students with different processing styles. Many digital platforms now feature embedded assistive technology, ensuring that essential supports, such as the ability to customize audio, are built into the learning experience from the start. Information also needs to be offered in formats that allow for user-driven adjustability. By socializing the use of high-contrast display themes or darker backgrounds, and enlarging font sizes or using digital magnifiers, students can feel empowered to customize features that are necessary for their own needs. Within Read&Write, text-to-speech can be adjusted by rate of speech and choice of AI-enhanced voices. Simplify Page can also be used to remove visual distractions commonly found in web-based reading, and the Screen Mask can be activated to support maintaining focus. With the use of these tools and many more, students shift from being passive recipients of information to becoming active designers of their own learning environment. In the last decade, the context for acquiring both print and digital resources has shifted significantly. Publishers and software designers are embracing anti-oppressive frameworks from school boards, including anti-Black racism and Indigenous equity policies. Educators can more actively choose from diverse content to ensure that every student sees themselves reflected in what they are learning. Board-approved generative AI can also serve as a transformative tool in this effort. Educators are able to create images, stories, and mathematical contexts that mirror the intersectional identities of their students. This intent, however, must be balanced with a critical lens so that educators examine potential AI-generated bias and ensure information is authentic and respectful.

Language & Symbols

The language and symbols used to represent curriculum can also create barriers to learning. Through inaccessible vocabulary, unfamiliar mathematical notation, and linguistic structures or cultural references, students may not be able to access the learning independently. Assistive technology serves as an essential lesson design element that ensures these barriers are avoided. Symbol-based communication software like Boardmaker and Clicker provides platforms where students can access vocabulary with visual representations and symbols that clarify meaning. Students can express themselves using customizable digital keyboards or word banks, sentence strips, or pre-written phrases that support their expression. This proactive approach extends to mathematical notation through tools like Equatio or OneNote Math Assistant, encouraging students to interact with complex formulas through speech, touch, or predictive text. In a UDL-designed environment, accessibility features like closed or live captioning for device media are always enabled, providing translations as a standard feature for all media forms. The success of these tools depends on the educator’s commitment to deeply knowing their learners through constant observation and reflection. This ongoing pedagogical refinement allows the teacher to puzzle through challenges alongside the students, using moments of confusion not as “failure”, but as an essential part of learning.

Building Knowledge

The final layer of representation involves building knowledge, where information is synthesized into deep understanding. Assistive technology provides powerful ways to collect and organize information. Using annotation tools like Collect Highlights in Read&Write, key ideas can be colour-coded across different websites and, with one click, pulled into a single document to serve as the basis of further idea generation, making the process of research visible. Annotation software eliminates the ‘copy-and-paste’ struggle, allowing students to focus on how their collected thoughts connect to one another. Live collaboration is a feature that many assistive technology tools have built into their platforms.  Whether through Google Workspace tools (i.e., Google Docs, Slides, Forms, etc.), or through programs like Mindomo or OrbitNote, students have the opportunity to bring together their understanding of the course content in conjunction with the tools they have learned to leverage. Some students may rely on videos or images to convey meaning, while others might insert links to websites, companion documents, or other resources that help articulate their thinking, and together, these sources of information can be woven seamlessly to form a multimodal and broadly accessible mind map, document, slide deck, or other platform they choose to leverage, that reflects individual strengths.

Try This in Your Classroom

• Take one resource and offer it in at least two formats (e.g., text and audio).
• Use one tool (e.g., Read&Write or captioning) and explicitly show students how to adjust it to meet their needs.
• Reflect: Whose identities are reflected in the materials I am using? Who might still be missing?

How Action and Expression Drive Learning

Supporting the diversity of students in our classrooms can be a daunting task when we consider the range of strengths and needs that are both formally and informally recognized and accommodated. Students’ instructional, environmental, and assessment accommodations, when compiled, can easily become unwieldy and difficult to operationalize. “Action and Expression” encapsulates the ways in which students do the work and share what they know. Embedding a diverse range of assistive tools into our learning environments prior to even knowing your class is central to promoting diverse means of action and expression. This pre-work can save time and energy later on because you are already prepared to meet many accessibility needs through intentional design. Our preparations around student action and expression reflect the belief that there is no single “right” way for students to express their thinking.

Interaction

Historically, students would interact with schoolwork in only a handful of ways.  In most cases, students had the opportunity to express their thinking in writing or orally, with little opportunity for other modalities beyond those supported by specialized educators working with students with perceptual disabilities. As technology has improved, students can interact with their work in a multitude of ways. When we consider device navigation, we often think about direct touch access or the use of a computer mouse or trackpad, but these access avenues are not ideal or accessible for some students. In response, many tools exist to support the diversity of interaction strengths and needs that students bring to learning spaces. Consider the basic accessibility features included in most operating systems. Screen zoom tools allow users to enlarge sections of the screen to make them more visible. Display adjustments can make a program more visually accessible through customizable colour contrast settings. A computer cursor can be enlarged and adjusted to stand out more clearly from the background, boosting visibility. Tools like a screen reader, such as ChromeVox or Microsoft Narrator, can identify elements of a webpage through audio description. Navigation has also been improved through integration with device sensors. With Face Control, voice navigation, switch access, sticky or slow keys, students can customize their experience to leverage the control they do have in situations where conventional device access is not reliable for them. Note that all major device operating systems have versions or variations of these basic accessibility features.  Educators and board-level technology staff can work collaboratively to ensure that students know where and how to activate or disable functions without special support. When educators take time to understand these features themselves, and build their use into learning environments, students can experience these tools in context, and adjust their own use as needed, independently.

Expression & Communication

As educators strive to offer a palette of options for students to act on their learning, it is important to offer multiple means to express and communicate. This continues to be complex and is directly related to what educators know about students through class profiles and portraits. Consider the use of innovative presentation tools such as Canva and Google Slides. Both offer a massive library of templates, organizational layouts, images, photos, emojis, stickers, and other multimedia, including recording tools for students to express themselves visually, with the addition of audio and/or video. Products built on publishing software can also act as shared, living documents where students can collaboratively map out their thoughts and wonderings in real-time. When teachers invite learners to contribute through a mix of images, video, audio, and text, these tools shift the classroom from individual expression toward a collective construction of knowledge.

Strategy Development

The final pillar of action and expression is concerned with how students develop and implement effective learning strategies. While educators will meet students at varying stages of cognitive development, it is helpful to consider and build in the kinds of practice that encourage the development of student executive capacity, or the ability to set and meet goals. In their lesson planning, educators can employ a range of tools to model strategy development as outlined in the CAST UDL guidelines. Sharing lesson goals with students, for example, can invite everyone in the learning space to practice setting and executing goals within a learning period, especially when there is an opportunity at the end to self-assess whether or not the lesson goal was achieved. Using an exit ticket strategy through Google Forms, OrbitNote, or even on the newsfeed of your learning management page, can intentionally draw students to consider the degree to which they have met the lesson goals. With this explicit and tracked check-in, educators can adjust subsequent lesson content as well as their mode of delivery, as needed. Similarly, we can use the physical space to support how students decide to use one mode of expression or another. Choice boards, for example, can remind students of the different ways they can “write” or “discuss”, highlighting key assistive technology that is specifically supportive of the learning in a particular context.  When students know that an instruction of “write” is not limited to a pen touching paper, they are empowered to choose an appropriate alternative that might work better for them. As educators, we still want to model taking risks and encourage students to move beyond what’s immediately comfortable to expand their skills. As students explore the curriculum, we should be encouraging them to try out new modes of action and expression. Educators can meaningfully include assistive technology into their own practice to model the use of tools so students can see what it looks like to be a resilient, independent, and motivated learner.

Try This in Your Classroom

• Offer students two different ways to demonstrate their learning (e.g., written, audio, visual).
• Introduce a simple choice board that includes at least one assistive technology option.
• Model trying a new tool yourself and talk through your thinking as a learner.

Conclusion: Affirming Identity by Designing for Student Agency

The evolution of UDL 3.0 represents a fundamental shift where equity and justice are centered within the classroom. By integrating a meaningful toolkit of assistive technologies, educators work to dismantle systemic barriers and build anti-ableist structures. This intentional design creates a safe, flexible environment where students can come to know themselves as learners. As they explore various means of engaging with, representing, and expressing their learning, students embrace and develop their unique strengths and areas of growth. Student agency is sometimes viewed as a separate result or product of universal design. While this is somewhat true, it is more accurate to view agency as a clarity that emerges when a student moves from choosing a tool because a teacher made it more accessible, to choosing a tool because they know it showcases their brilliance. In this sense, agency is the ultimate expression of an affirmed identity. When educators use assistive technology effectively to build universally designed learning environments, they aren’t just sharing options, they are providing the mirrors in which students can finally see their own skills and abilities.

References

CAST. (2024). Universal Design for Learning Guidelines version 3.0. [URL] Kinoomaadziwin Education Body. (2021). Anishinabek Education System: Special Education Guideline. [URL]

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