Title II Update

Dear Colleagues, 

I applaud and appreciate your continued commitment to ensuring that UMaine is an accessible institution, one which supports and meets the needs of all of our students, co-workers, and the public. Complying with the requirements of Title II of the Americans with Disabilities Act is an essential and legally required component of this commitment as well as an ongoing, collaborative institutional goal.   

We must continue our vigorous efforts to comply with Title II by April 24. Our chief ambition should be to make further discernible progress. I urge you to focus on what moves UMaine toward our shared goal of accessibility instead of any adverse consequences that could potentially result from imperfect compliance. Development, not fear of discipline, should animate our collective work. Administrators, faculty and staff must work cooperatively and avoid taking unreasonable action that could disrupt our ongoing pursuit of progress.

Today I have asked the Deans to provide, by May 15, a list of ways that the Provost’s Office can better support you as you prepare to teach courses with Title II compliant materials in AY26-27. The Campus Title II committee will strive to develop resources beyond those already made available by UMS and UMaine, but any input you can provide to your Dean by early May would be greatly appreciated since digital accessibility is an evolving technical standard and our approach to it must remain supple enough to evolve as well.

As a reminder, UMaine continues to develop guides, workflows, and training opportunities for working with the most common digital file formats and on the most public-facing platforms. Many of these have been described in the campus Title II committee’s messages of December 1st and 23rd as well as February 10th. Current efforts include:

• Assessing a range (and a mix) of genAI services and workflows which would help faculty and staff remediate files. 
• Identifying where and how additional staff, such as student staff, would effectively support the effort.
• Exploring ways of adding new, audio descriptive tracks to our DVD holdings.
• Working with faculty to develop shared practices for making accessible files when working in specialized applications such as ESRI ArcGIS, LaTEX, and R.

Of course, I realize that many of you are already in the process of preparing your AY26-27 courses and that new resources may not benefit you in the near term. I also appreciate that it may be difficult to determine what to prioritize and how to sequence your Title II compliance efforts. Based on numerous conversations with faculty and staff in recent weeks, I believe the following prioritization in the creation of new course materials or the remediation of older materials would help to ensure that your AY26-27 courses are Title II compliant:

1. Highest priority: externally-facing websites and similar resources we make available to the public in order that they may engage with the University and our public mission.

2. Second highest priority: current/active course content contained in or linked from Brightspace course shells, Google Drive, or Sharepoint folders; student records in Navigate; and, similar resources which limit access via password-protected firewalls. Only specific members of our University community access these materials and only for defined periods of time. If you have courses that are not yet in session (e.g. Summer 2026, Fall 2026, or Spring 2027 courses), Title II compliance is not necessary until they are published – i.e., active and available to students in the course(s).  

3. Third highest priority: transient emails to co-workers, fieldnotes recorded manually or automatically from sensors in spreadsheets, internal budget-tracking documents, committee meeting notes and/or Zoom recordings shared only with meeting participants, and similar operational resources shared only with a small, known group in the course of doing business and conducting research, but which have no long-term public or community utility or function. 

I hope these thoughts are useful to you as you prepare for AY26-27. I expect to be able to provide you with additional resources in the coming weeks and months. I have been impressed with your diligence and care, both of which display your deep commitment to accessibility to all members of our community, including the public that relies on our services. I recognize that the major progress you have made on this front has not been without its costs.

Sincerely,

Gabriel Paquette
Executive Vice President for Academic Affairs and Provost
University of Maine and University of Maine at Machias
5703 Alumni Hall, Suite 201 | Orono, ME 04469