Have you heard about the new accessibility requirements coming from Title II of the ADA?

If you're in higher ed, you may have been tracking this for a while. If you're in K-12, this might be new to you. It was new for us: as of March of this year, we hadn't heard of it. We're grateful to our friends in the economic education network who brought it to our attention at the National Association of Economic Educators (NAEE) Conference.

If this is new, let's catch you up

In 2024, the Department of Justice set new digital accessibility standards under Title II of the ADA. They require state and local government entities, including public school districts, state education agencies, and public universities, to bring their websites, apps, and digital materials up to WCAG 2.1 Level AA, a widely used technical standard for accessible web and document design. The goal is for materials to work for people using assistive technology, like screen readers. In practice, that means things like alternative “alt” text for images, captions for videos, documents that screen readers can navigate, specific color contrast levels, and a unique title on every slide. The original compliance deadlines have been pushed back. Entities serving populations of 50,000 or more now have until April 26, 2027, and smaller ones have until April 26, 2028.

These changes don’t only help students who use assistive technology – everyone stands to benefit. Strong color contrast makes slides easier to read for all students and is especially helpful for those with color vision challenges. Captions help English language learners and anyone watching a video in a noisy room. Clear slide titles and headings make it easier for every student to identify key information.

As an independent non-profit Econiful isn’t a regulated entity under Title II. But because districts are increasingly responsible for making sure the materials and vendors they rely on meet the same standard, we knew it mattered for us to meet it too. We value accessibility and want our materials to work for you, your students, and your district.

We've spent some time learning what WCAG 2.1 AA actually requires, and it's changed our work on both of our curricula.

For our existing economics curriculum, it means going back through documents, slides, and lesson materials we built before we knew about this standard and bringing them into alignment. That's slower, more deliberate work. Here’s our plan: 

• Now: Instruction Slides. We’re going unit by unit through the Instruction Slides in our lesson plans.
• Next: Lesson plans. Once the slides are done, we’ll move to the lesson plan documents themselves.
• Then: Stand-alone documents. Finally, we’ll bring our handouts, activities, and other stand-alone materials into alignment.

We’ll keep you posted as we make progress, and we appreciate your patience.

Our one-semester personal finance curriculum is a different story. We're building it right now, so every document and slide deck is designed with WCAG 2.1 AA in mind from the first draft. 

We won’t be perfect (in either curriculum), but we’re making a good-faith effort.

We want to be upfront; we won’t reach 100% compliance on every file, and we’ve learned accessibility checking tools don’t always cooperate. For example, sometimes we mark an image as decorative, which should tell a screen reader to skip it, and some screen readers still announce it as an image with no alt text. Tables are another challenge. Merged cells and complex formatting can make a table hard for a screen reader to read in a logical order, so we simplify where we can and do our best where we can’t. What we can promise is that we’re working through every resource carefully and doing our best to make the materials as accessible as we can.

What we'd tell you

Designing for accessibility from the start is much easier than retrofitting it later. Take the Instruction Slides for Lesson 1.10, Adding Complexity to the PPF: Part 2. Every slide heading, including the lesson name across the top, was a free-floating text box, so a screen reader couldn't find a title on 17 of the 18 slides. None of the PPF graphs had alt text either. Fixing them meant rebuilding each slide with a proper template and writing a description for every graph. And if you're wondering why the section title slides now have a purple background, that's for contrast: it makes the text easier to read for people with low vision and for anyone squinting at a projector screen from the back row.

If you're building slides right now, learn this earlier than we did.

Tools we’ve found helpful

• Accessibility checkers. Microsoft PowerPoint and Word have built-in accessibility under Review > Check Accessibility. It flags missing alt text, missing slide titles, and low contrast. Adobe Acrobat has a similar checker for PDFs.
  • Google Slides requires an extension. We use the paid version of Grackle, which is much better than the “free” version. Talk to your district and see if they have, or are willing to get you an account.
• Contrast checkers. The WebAIM Contrast Checker tells you whether your text and background colors meet WCAG 2.1 AA.
• Automatic captions. YouTube and PowerPoint can both generate captions.
  • Videos embedded in Google Slides often don’t load captions. To work around this, we add alt text describing the video’s key concept and link directly to the video on YouTube whenever possible.

A tip for writing alt-text

Writing alt text for every graph and image is really time-consuming! We've been using Claude AI to speed it up. We upload a slide deck and give it this prompt:

Create alt text for every image in this deck. Base it on the actual lesson content on each slide (not just a literal description), and follow WCAG 2.1 guidance — concise, functional, skip purely decorative template graphics. Present the information in a table with slide number in one column and suggested alt text in another. Alt text should always be a complete sentence. Provide the alt text in the chat.

We still read every suggestion before it goes into the slides, since we know the lesson best. But it gets us a strong first draft for a whole deck in a few minutes.

Whether it is alt text, slide titles, or color contrast, accessibility is now a permanent part of how we build materials at Econiful, and we’re excited to keep improving how we support you and your students.