Web Accessibility
Web accessibility helps people with disabilities to understand, navigate, and interact with the Web. It also benefits those with changing abilities due to aging or temporary ailments.
It is essential that your department's web pages be accessible in order to provide equal access and opportunity to people with diverse abilities.
Lamar University's CMS will assist you with web content that requires accessibility tags. When in doubt, please contact WebComm for assistance.
Best Practices for Accessible Content
When creating digital content, make sure to consider the following:
- Do not rely on color as a navigational tool or as the sole way to differentiate items.
- Always check background and text colors for accessibility. Use an online color contrast checker.
- Images should include Alt text in the markup/code.
- Images with text on them may NOT be used as sole content. Complex images of this type should have descriptions near the image (perhaps as a caption or descriptive summaries built right into a neighboring paragraph). We will not allow images with more than 10 words.
- Tables need a summary description. Tell visitors the number of columns and rows, giving a brief description of layout.
- Provide transcripts for podcasts.
- If you have a video on your site, you must provide visual access to the audio information through in-sync captioning.
- Consider 508 testing to assure your site is in compliance.
