Accessibility Begins With You
As part of our university’s commitment to ensuring everyone has access to information resources developed, maintained, distributed and procured by our institution, 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.