Accessibility Begins With You
Texas A&M University has a longstanding tradition of providing equal access and opportunities to discover, communicate, and apply knowledge and abilities. As part of our university’s commitment to enrichment and diversity, it's essential that everyone have access to information resources developed, maintained, distributed and procured by our institution. With this in mind, accessibility should be a concern for all of us, regardless of our roles on campus.
Be an Accessibility Innovator
Each of us has a responsibility to ensure the design, development, distribution and procurement of Electronic and Information Resources at Texas A&M. Being an Accessibility Innovator enables you to go one step further by actively influencing others around you, promoting a campus culture that values the unique characteristics and capabilities of others.
As an Accessibility Innovator you should pledge to:
- Be respectful and helpful to everyone
- Be understanding of each individual's capabilities
- Utilize accessibility best practices in instructional and business endeavors
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Provide referrals to accessibility programs and services as needed
- Actively seek assistance and accessibility training as needed
Contact the Technology Services accessibility team to see how you can help promote accessibility at your campus location.
Did you know?
- In the United States, about 55 million people have a disability (src: 2010 U.S. Census).
- About 1 in 5 Americans have some kind of disability (src: 2010 U.S. Census).
- The percentage of people affected by disabilities is growing as our population ages.
- Two popular, free screen readers are VoiceOver (Mac OS and iOS) and NVDA (Win).
- Good accessibility practices can improve the search ranking of your website.
- Form fields without labels can cause problems for some assistive technology users.
- Low color contrast makes content difficult to see, especially for users with low vision.
- Documents linked on a website need to be accessible too (e.g., PDF and Word files).
- Audio content, like podcasts, need transcripts for deaf or hard of hearing users.
- Online videos should be captioned for deaf or hard of hearing users.
- Using HTML tags correctly is very important for accessibility.
- Descriptive link text helps make a website more accessible. Avoid using "Click here" or "Read more."
- A "screen reader" is an application that reads content aloud to a user.
- There is no "alt tag" in HTML. "Alt" is an attribute used with the img tag.
- HTML uses the alt attribute to provide a text description of an image.
- Alt text should describe an image, if the purpose of the image is to convey information.
- If an image is a link, the alt text for the image should explain where the link goes.
- If an image is only being used for decoration, the alt text should be null (i.e., alt="").
- If a table has headers, using header tags (<th>) will make the table more accessible.
- An accessible website is one that can be navigated and understood by everyone.