When new federal accessibility rules forced her to overhaul years of course materials, University of Nebraska–Lincoln professor Manda Williamson decided there had to be a better way.
Over the summer, Williamson, a professor of practice in psychology, began updating her classroom materials — including PowerPoint slides — to comply with updated Title II rules under the Americans with Disabilities Act. The process, she said, quickly proved to be time-consuming and frustrating.
“I completely redid one of the courses that I teach, and that’s when I realized how tricky and sometimes tedious it is to bring materials into Title II compliance,” Williamson said. “Then I realized that in three of the classes I teach during the regular semesters, the materials were developed entirely by me and not provided by a textbook company. That’s when the panic set in.”
Williamson said accessibility checkers often flagged hundreds of issues in a single presentation.
“Sometimes when I ran them through the accessibility checker, there were more than 400 issues that had to be handled one at a time,” she said.
Drawing on programming knowledge from her undergraduate mathematics studies, Williamson developed a macro-based tool to streamline the process. The tool, called NUtitleII, helps faculty review and fix common accessibility issues in PowerPoint presentations and ultimately saves hours of manual work.
Williamson partnered with NUtech Ventures, the university’s nonprofit technology commercialization affiliate, to make NUtitleII available to other faculty.
NUtitleII works with PowerPoint’s built-in Accessibility Checker to address repetitive fixes the checker identifies, including adding or standardizing slide titles, filling in alternative text fields, marking simple shapes and lines as decorative, and setting table header rows. While users must still review slides — particularly those with complex images — to ensure titles and alternative text accurately describe the content, the tool reduces the amount of manual editing required.
“I’ve found that this has reduced the amount of time it takes me to bring my slides into compliance so it becomes more about reviewing my slides and making sure they convey what I want them to,” Williamson said. “Now I look at both the text and the image descriptions knowing I already have a starting point and don’t have to build everything from scratch.”
NUtitleII is available through NUtech’s storefront in the UNL Marketplace. For more information, faculty can visit the NUtitleII listing in the marketplace or contact Scott Shaver at sshaver@nutechventures.org. Educators seeking additional Title II resources and guidance on accessible materials are encouraged to visit UNL’s Center for Transformative Teaching.
The updated Title II rule was announced in April 2024 by the U.S. Department of Justice and has a compliance deadline of April 26, 2026. Under the rule, state and local government entities, including public universities, must ensure covered digital content meets Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.1 Level AA standards. The rule applies to web content and mobile applications, including instructional materials and course content delivered through university systems such as Canvas.
