Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) Title II Frequently Asked Questions

With 1 in 4 people in the U.S. living with a disability, ensuring accessibility is simply the right thing to do for your audience. 

The NIU community values and celebrates diversity in all its forms. This means striving for equity – removing barriers to access and giving everyone the specific tools they need to succeed. To benefit our students, region, state, nation and world – as stated in our mission – we need to make the knowledge and resources we create available and accessible.  

The Department of Justice's final rule updating Title II of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) states that state and local government websites and mobile apps must comply with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) Version 2.1, Level AA. This means all online content must be accessible to people with disabilities. 

No, the accessibility standards were established by the federal government as part of their amendments to the Americans with Disabilities Act. The new rule was issued in April of 2024 and applies to all state and local government organizations, including all public higher education institutions.

Yes, even though students, faculty and staff are required to log in to access content on Blackboard, the course content created in Blackboard must generally need to conform to the accessibility standards. The Department of Justice, the entity responsible for issuing and enforcing this rule, believes that proactive accessibility of course content for all students, rather than rapid remediation, would result in reliable access to course content. 

PDFs were originally intended to make it easier to produce and share files for printed content. PDFs should not be used to present content that users will read online. The University of Wisconsin- Madison provides a great overview of the usability and accessibility issues with PDFs.

The new rule lists a series of mechanisms that are designed to make it feasible for institutions to comply, such as: 

• A demonstration that compliance would result in a fundamental alteration to the nature of a service, program or activity or an undue financial and administration burden (§ 35.200, § 35.204)  

• Exceptions listed in § 35.201: archived web content, preexisting conventional electronic documents, content posted by a third party, individualized, password-protected or otherwise secured conventional electronic documents, and preexisting social media posts. The application fo exception is further explained in the rule.  

• The use of a conforming alternate version and equivalent facilitation where it is not possible to make web content directly accessible due to technical or legal limitations.  

• A demonstration that noncompliance has such a minimal impact on access that it would not affect the ability of individuals with disabilities to use the public entity’s web content or mobile app to do any of the following in a manner that provides substantially equivalent timelines, privacy, independence and ease of use: access the same information as individuals without disabilities; engage in the same interactions as individuals without disabilities; conduct the same transactions as individuals without disabilities; and otherwise participate in or benefit from the same services, programs, and activities as individuals without disabilities. 

People with disabilities should have equal access to content in the same place and the same format. Alternate versions of content are only allowed when there is a technical or legal limitation to making the original content accessible.

It depends on the size of the document. In general, it’s much faster to design a document with accessibility in mind than going back and fixing an inaccessible document. Adding heading styles, using lists instead of tables, using contextual links and adding alt text and a document title take very little time when creating a new document.

No, PowerPoints are not prohibited from being added to Blackboard.