Affecting Business Processes
Incorporating accessibility into employee hiring and review processes
- Recruit and hire staff with an understanding of accessibility policy and practices.
- Include accessibility preferences and requirements within job postings and position descriptions, and clearly indicate how such criteria specifically apply to typical job duties.
- Develop accessibility training schedules and/or continuing education expectations for each position.
- Utilize accessibility as one parameter by which to measure job performance during annual reviews.
Establishing the value of accessibility within your team
- Make accessibility a priority—from document creation to design and development.
- Consider accessibility during project initiation and utilize periodic accessibility checks throughout the duration of a project.
- Design and develop with the uniqueness of people in mind.
- Discuss accessibility best practices as they apply to team tasks.
- Encourage procurement of Electronic and Information Resources.
- Recognize individual and team efforts that advance Texas A&M’s accessibility initiatives.
Advocate for accessibility on campus
- Take interest in individuals’ capabilities and contributions.
- Promote accessibility as an extension of our University
- Encourage campus stakeholders to expand the reach of Texas A&M University by considering the needs of all audiences
- Engage others in accessibility discussions and advocate for accessibility at every opportunity.
- Work to decrease University risk by doing the right thing—it’s a win-win!
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.