Procuring Accessible Digital Resources
Ensuring the procurement of accessible Digital Resources is the first step to enabling everyone—including those with disabilities—to perceive, understand, navigate and interact with technology. The following can help you navigate the procurement process for Digital Resources:
Digital Resources developed, procured, or significantly changed by institutions of higher education in the state of Texas must comply with accessibility laws, policies, and standards that serve as guidance for ensuring all members of the public have access to information.
The regulations apply to Digital Resources used by Texas A&M directly, or by a third party, acting as an agent of, or on behalf of, the university, or through procured services (vendor) contracts; and, services involving Digital Resources provided through hosted or managed services contracts.
Procurement includes the acquisition of open source (free) Digital Resources, and it may or may not involve a contract or exchange of funds.
Digital Resources include, but are not limited to:
- Software applications and operating systems
- Websites, including both Internet and intranet
- Telecommunications products
- Video and multimedia products
- Self-contained, closed products, such as copiers, printers and kiosks
- Desktop and portable computers
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.