Title II Compliance

All instructional material accessible to students must follow Title II accessibility guidelines. This includes PowerPoint presentations, word documents, and other other content/information shared with students. 

The UCLA Teaching and Learning Center (TLC), Bruin Learn Center of Excellence (CoE), Disabilities and Computing Program (DCP), and additional campus partners are working to enhance our digital accessibility resources for instructors in alignment with UCLA and UC commitments to inclusive excellence. The university has also established the Digital Accessibility Steering Committee to provide strategic direction, aligns efforts across campus, oversees institutional risk mitigation, and advises UCLA leadership on resource allocation and prioritization in support of digital accessibility. 

The UCLA Teaching and Learning Center has developed a website to assist instructors with ensuring Title II compliance. Instructors should review the website for a variety of training and support resources: 

Making Your Course Accessible

PDF documents published after April 24, 2026 must meet WCAG 2.1 AA and be fully accessible to screen readers and keyboard users. Only remediated PDFs that are legally required to be available in that format and meet accessibility standards (proper tags, correct reading order, searchable text/OCR, meaningful alt text for images, and bookmarks where appropriate) may be uploaded to the website or used across the school.

You can choose to make your PDFs accessible by following the instructions from Adobe: Create and verify PDF accessibility (Acrobat Pro)

PDF remediation is a work intensive and time consuming process, so it is worth searching for an alternative accessible version before embarking on remediation. Adobe provides an in-depth recorded webinar on PDF remediation that can also support your skill development. Where possible, convert content to a native web page or other platform type (e.g. Box Document, Google Document, etc.) to improve accessibility, discoverability, and mobile usability. 

The UCLA Teaching and Learning Center has extensive instructions on how to make PDFs accessible, whether for instructional material or otherwise. 

Create Accessibile PDFs

PDFs that are needed as printable documents/forms should be added to Box and linked from there. 

Images used across any/all digital platforms managed or disseminated by the school must include alt (alternative) text describing the image itself and/or the intent of the image for any person(s) accessing the content. 

What you must do:

• Provide alt text for all meaningful images used in any digital content that is shared on the web, via email, or otherwise. 
• Refrain from using images that are primarily text (e.g., flyers, posters, etc.), tables or images that contain QR codes.
• For complex images (graphs, charts), supply a long description adjacent to the image or via an accessible link.

Writing alt text:

Describe the purpose, not just the picture

• Alt text should communicate why the image is there and what the user needs to know from it.

Example:

• Not helpful: “Person smiling.”
• Useful: “Nursing student administering a vaccination during clinical training.”

Keep it concise but meaningful

• Aim for context-rich descriptions in 1–2 sentences. Screen readers will stop at punctuation naturally.

Don’t start with “Image of…”

• Screen readers already announce it’s an image. Jump straight into the description.

Capture text that appears in the image

• If an image contains text essential to understanding, the same text must appear in the alt text or nearby.

Example:

• For a flyer: include the event name, date, and essential details.
• For a chart: summarize the key trend, not every datapoint.

NOTE: Whenever possible, do not use images with a lot of text. 

Alt text must be added to all images when they are used in digital content. Every application (MS Word, PPT, Outlook, web platform) provides the functionality to add alt text. To add it, simply right-click the image after it's been placed on document, presentation slide, etc., and find the 'alt text' or 'alternative text' option. This will open an additional field where you will input the necessary alt text. 

Multimedia must be perceivable to users with visual or auditory disabilities. WCAG 2.1 AA requires captions, transcripts, and accessible players.

What you must do:

• Provide captions for all prerecorded videos.
  • All videos must have accurate captions and a transcript. Machine-generated captions alone are not sufficient and must be reviewed and corrected by a human.
• Provide audio descriptions for videos where essential visual information is not available through dialogue.