EIR Accessibility in Texas A&M Procurement
Texas laws require that Electronic and Information Resources (EIR) used, developed, procured, or distributed by Texas agencies and institutions of higher education are accessible to people with disabilities.
As part of Texas A&M University’s procurement process for products and services that meet the definition of Electronic and Information Resources, EIR accessibility-related documentation must be submitted by vendors for each offering, or family of similar offerings.
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- For commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) software and online services, EIR Accessibility is determined by vendor evaluations of each offering or family of similar offerings against a set of accessibility standards as defined in Texas Administrative Code 1TAC 206 State Websites and 1TAC 213 Electronic and Information Resources Accessibility. Vendors should document the results of these evaluations by completing a Voluntary Product Accessibility Template® (VPAT®).
Note: Completed VPATs® , or links to them, must be included as part of responses to Texas A&M University solicitations. - For Texas A&M solicitations related to development services for software, websites, web applications, etc., VPAT® documentation is not applicable; however, in accordance with 1 TAC 213, vendors will be asked to provide credible evidence of their capability or ability to produce accessible EIR products and services. Such evidence may include, but is not limited to, internal accessibility policy documents, contractual warranties for accessibility, accessibility testing documents, and examples of prior work results.
- For commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) software and online services, EIR Accessibility is determined by vendor evaluations of each offering or family of similar offerings against a set of accessibility standards as defined in Texas Administrative Code 1TAC 206 State Websites and 1TAC 213 Electronic and Information Resources Accessibility. Vendors should document the results of these evaluations by completing a Voluntary Product Accessibility Template® (VPAT®).
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.