You just got the email. Maybe it came from your department chair, maybe from the provost's office, maybe from disability services. The message is some version of this: your course materials need to be accessible, and there's a deadline.
If you're like most faculty, you have questions. What does "accessible" actually mean for a PowerPoint deck? What exactly do you need to change? And how are you supposed to do this for every presentation you've built over the past decade?
This guide walks through what ADA compliance requires for PowerPoint files, what the remediation process actually looks like, and how to approach it without losing your weekends.
What ADA Compliance Requires for PowerPoint
The Americans with Disabilities Act, combined with Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act, establishes that digital content at public institutions must be accessible to people with disabilities. For universities specifically, the ADA Title II deadline of April 2026 requires public institutions to bring their digital content into compliance, and that includes course materials like PowerPoint presentations.
Here's what "accessible" means in practice for a PPTX file:
Alt text for every image. Screen readers cannot interpret images. Every photo, chart, diagram, and graphic in your slides needs a text description that conveys the same information a sighted user would get. Decorative images need to be marked as such so screen readers skip them.
Correct reading order. When a screen reader encounters a slide, it reads elements in the order they appear in PowerPoint's internal object list, not the visual layout you see on screen. If you've ever moved text boxes around or layered elements, your reading order is almost certainly wrong.
Slide titles on every slide. Each slide needs a unique title element (not just large text that looks like a title). Screen readers use these titles for navigation, the same way sighted users scan slide headings.
Document language tags. The file needs a language attribute set so screen readers know how to pronounce the content. PowerPoint doesn't make this easy to set, and many files have no language tag at all.
Sufficient color contrast. Text must have at least a 4.5:1 contrast ratio against its background (3:1 for large text). That light gray text on a white background in your department template? It likely fails.
Meaningful hyperlink text. Links need descriptive text rather than raw URLs or generic "click here" labels.
The Manual Process (and Why It's Brutal)
Let's walk through what it actually takes to remediate a typical 30-slide lecture deck by hand.
Alt text: Right-click each image, select "Edit Alt Text," and write a description. For a deck with 15 images, that's 15 individual right-click operations plus the time to write meaningful descriptions. A chart with data trends might take a minute or two to describe well. Budget 20-30 minutes just for alt text on an image-heavy deck.
Reading order: Open the Selection Pane (Home > Arrange > Selection Pane), then check the order on every slide. The list is displayed bottom-to-top, which is counterintuitive. You'll need to drag items into the correct sequence for each slide. For a 30-slide deck, expect 15-25 minutes, more if slides have complex layouts.
Slide titles: Check every slide for a proper title placeholder. If you used a text box instead of the built-in title element, you'll need to replace it. Slides with intentionally blank titles (like section dividers or image-only slides) need to be handled differently.
Language tags: This one is genuinely painful. PowerPoint's interface doesn't expose the document-level language setting in an obvious way. For older files, you may need to edit the underlying XML. Most people don't even know this is a requirement until an audit flags it.
Realistic time estimate: For a moderately complex 30-slide presentation, expect 45 to 90 minutes of remediation work. Multiply that by the number of decks you use in a semester. If you teach two courses with 25 lectures each, you're looking at 40 to 75 hours of remediation work. Per semester.
A Better Approach
The accessibility requirements themselves are reasonable. The problem is that PowerPoint wasn't designed to make compliance easy, and doing it manually doesn't scale.
This is where automated remediation tools come in. Tools like Aprivo automate the tedious parts of the process. Upload your PPTX file, and AI analyzes every slide: generating contextual alt text for images, correcting reading order, verifying slide titles, and addressing language tags. You review the suggested fixes, approve or edit them, and download the accessible version.
What takes 45-90 minutes by hand takes a few minutes with automated remediation. The AI-generated alt text is contextual, meaning it understands that a bar chart in a biology lecture is showing species population data, not just "a chart." You stay in control of the final output, but you're reviewing and approving rather than building from scratch.
Aprivo's free tier includes 10 decks per month, which is enough to test the process with your own materials and see the quality of the output before committing to anything.
Get Started Before the Deadline
The April 2026 ADA Title II deadline is approaching, and accessibility backlogs at most institutions are significant. Starting now, even with a few decks at a time, is better than facing a wall of remediation work next spring.
Start free — 10 decks/month, no credit card required.
Frequently Asked Questions
Do I need to make every old presentation accessible, or just new ones?
Under ADA Title II, public universities need to ensure that digital content used in current courses is accessible. If you're actively using an older deck in your teaching, it falls under the requirement. Archived materials that are no longer in use are generally lower priority, but anything students can currently access should be remediated.
Does PowerPoint's built-in Accessibility Checker handle all of this?
PowerPoint's Accessibility Checker is a good starting point, but it has significant gaps. It flags missing alt text but can't write it for you. It doesn't reliably catch reading order problems, doesn't check language tags, and doesn't assess the quality of existing alt text. Think of it as a partial audit tool, not a remediation tool.
What if my university already uses Blackboard Ally?
Ally is excellent at scanning course content and generating accessibility scores, and it creates alternative formats like HTML and audio versions. But Ally does not modify your original PowerPoint file. If your PPTX has missing alt text or broken reading order, those issues remain in the source file even after Ally flags them. Aprivo addresses the source file itself, so when you re-upload the remediated PPTX, your Ally scores improve because the underlying issues are fixed.