You don't say what version you're using; this may impact the availability
of certain ACLs. For HEAD code, which should be relatively similar to
2.2.17 in this field, the slapd.access(5) man page documents the "val"
option for attributeType qualification; it says
attrs=<attr> val[.<style>]=<attrval>
which means that only one attribute type must be present ("<attr>"); it
doesn't mention submatch (from DN?) expansion, and I'm pretty sure the
code doesn't do that. What you want to do can be obtained by using
access to dn.subtree="cn=people,dc=uta,dc=edu"
by set.exact="this/accountName & user/uid" read
Of course you may need more rules to make sure that "user" actually is an
account.