Web Accessibility Training
The accessibility team within Technology Services offers the following web accessibility training courses at Texas A&M. The courses are regularly hosted by Employee & Organizational Development, and participants can register on TrainTraq.
The above courses can be found under Web Page Development section. Additional topic-specific training is provided for campus work groups as requested:
- Creating Accessible Documents
- Procuring Accessible Electronic and Information Resources (EIR)
- Incorporating Accessibility into the Project Life Cycle
Contact the Technology Services accessibility team for more information about scheduling a session.
Additional Training Resources
Self-paced accessibility training:
- Texas Department of Information Resources (DIR) tools, training and related resources
- LinkedIn Learning; log in at https://linkedinlearning.tamu.edu with your NetID and password.
- Deque University (fee-based service)
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.