Procuring IT Products and Services
IT accessibility is the set of strategies, guidelines, and resources that make Electronic and Information Resources (EIR) accessible to everyone. It involves developing policies and implementing processes to ensure the functional use of EIR by people of all abilities in an independent manner.
Steps to procuring accessible EIR
Ensuring the procurement of accessible EIR is the first step to enabling everyone—including those with disabilities—to perceive, understand, navigate and interact with technology.
- Accessibility first
- Procurement tips
- VPAT®/vendor resources
- The VPAT® in Texas A&M procurement
- The ACE Tool (login required)
- Exception requests
- Procurement FAQs
Basis for procuring accessible EIR products and services
Effective April 18, 2020, unless an exception is approved by the president or chancellor of an institution of higher education or an exemption has been made for the following EIR categories pursuant to 1 Texas Administrative Code §213.37, all EIR developed, procured, or changed by an institution of higher education shall comply with Texas Administrative Code accessibility requirements (specifically 1 TAC §206 and 1 TAC §213) which reference standards contained within Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act and subsequently require conformance with 1) Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0 Level AA and 2) Functional Performance Criteria contained within.
Further, Texas A&M University is committed to the recently incorporated guidelines of WCAG 2.1 in order to be fully compliant with federal standards, including Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act. See What's New in WCAG 2.1 to see how standards have changed from the WCAG 2.0 version. For more information about these and upcoming modifications, see the WCAG 2 FAQ.
Texas A&M Standard Administrative Procedure 29.01.04.M0.02 supports state and federal laws that govern EIR which include, but are not limited to:
- Software applications and operating systems
- Websites, including public-facing and intranet
- Telecommunications products
- Video and Multimedia products
- Hardware, including desktop computers, laptops, and closed products such as copiers, printers, kiosks, digital signage, etc.
- Functional performance criteria described in 1 TAC §213.35
- Information, documentation, and support described in 1 TAC §213.36
- Emerging technologies
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.