Accessibility at CenTex Press

News should be accessible to everyone.

CenTex Press believes everyone in our community should be able to access local news, public information and the documents behind our reporting.

Disability should not be a barrier to knowing what your local government is doing, understanding an issue affecting your family, reading a community story or participating in the public conversation.

Accessibility is therefore part of how we are building CenTex Press, not something we intend to add later.

Our Accessibility Goal

CenTex Press aims to conform to the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.2, Level AA, the international accessibility standard published by the World Wide Web Consortium.

These guidelines are designed to make websites more accessible to people with a wide range of disabilities and accessibility needs.

Our goal is for CenTex Press to be:

Perceivable. Operable. Understandable. Robust.

And, just as importantly:

Readable by real people using real devices.

How We Build for Accessibility

CenTex Press is being designed with accessibility built into the website itself.

That includes:

• Semantic HTML and logical heading structures
• Keyboard-accessible navigation
• Visible keyboard focus indicators
• Skip-to-content navigation
• Alternative text for meaningful images
• Sufficient contrast between text and backgrounds
• Text that can be enlarged without losing content or functionality
• Responsive layouts for phones, tablets and computers
• Clearly labeled links and buttons
• Accessible form labels and instructions
• Screen-reader-friendly page structure
• Reduced-motion support for readers who request it through their device or browser
• Captions, transcripts or text alternatives when practical for multimedia content

We do not believe an accessibility widget should be a substitute for building an accessible website.

Public Documents and The Receipts

CenTex Press publishes and links to government records through The Receipts.

These may include:

• Budgets
• Agendas
• Ordinances
• Contracts
• Audits
• Reports
• Public records
• Presentations
• Scanned government documents

Some of these documents were created by third parties or government agencies and may not have been designed for accessibility.

Older PDFs and scanned documents can be especially difficult for screen readers because they may contain images of text rather than machine-readable text.

When practical, CenTex Press will provide context, descriptions or accessible information alongside important source documents.

Images

Images that communicate meaningful information should include appropriate alternative text or accompanying descriptions.

Purely decorative images should be identified so assistive technologies can skip them.

For charts, graphics and data visualizations, our goal is to communicate important information in text as well as visually.

Video and Audio

When CenTex Press publishes original video or audio, we will work toward providing captions, transcripts or another appropriate text alternative.

Embedded videos and other content hosted by outside platforms may be subject to the accessibility practices of those providers.

Advertising and External Content

CenTex Press may display advertisements and link to or embed information provided by third parties.

We cannot completely control the accessibility of websites, advertising platforms, social-media services, embedded videos or other services operated by outside organizations.

Where practical, we will favor technology and partners that support accessible experiences.

Español

Accessibility also means making information understandable to the communities we serve.

CenTex Press is being designed to support journalism in both English and Spanish.

Language availability may vary by story, and we will identify translated content when available.

If You Encounter a Barrier

We want to know.

If something on CenTex Press prevents you from accessing information, reading an article, navigating the website, submitting information or using one of our features, please contact us.

It helps if you can tell us:

• Which page caused the problem
• What you were trying to do
• What went wrong
• What device or browser you were using, if known
• What assistive technology you were using, if applicable

You do not need to understand accessibility terminology to report a problem.

Simply tell us what happened.

Request an Accessible Alternative

If you cannot access a CenTex Press article, document, image, video or other material because of an accessibility barrier, contact us.

When reasonably possible, we will work with you to provide the information in another accessible format.

That could include:

• A text version of information
• A description of an image or graphic
• Help locating information within a document
• A transcript or written summary
• Another reasonable accessible format

There is no charge for requesting an accessible alternative.

Accessibility Is Ongoing

CenTex Press is a growing newsroom, and the website will continue to change.

New stories, documents, advertisements, multimedia, community submissions and technology will create new accessibility challenges.

We will continue improving the site as we find problems and as accessibility standards and technology evolve.

If we get something wrong, tell us.

We would rather know about the problem and work to fix it than pretend every part of the website will always be perfect.

Contact CenTex Press

For an accessibility question, request or problem, reach us through our Contact page.

CenTex Press
Central Texas, United States