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Making Social media Accessible

Making Social media Accessible  I was inspired to write this after I came across an issue with screen readers translating hashtags correctly, below I have listed and briefly explained some techniques that people posting to social media can use to make their posts more accessible.  I am not going to get specific regarding each platform as there are some external resources for platform-specific settings and techniques. Hashtags With the ubiquity of hashtags in everyday communication, it becomes critical for the understanding of a post for a hashtag to be able to be read by screen readers.  Put simply the following will be read by a screen reader #iamahashtag, although let us face it it is hard for someone who can see to read, instead capitalize each word such as #IamAHashTag. Image Description Pretty self-explanatory – when uploading an image add a description.  This is what screen readers will read out, so make it as descriptive as you can. Video captioning It is not as hard
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Welcome

Welcome my blog I thought a good start would be to talk about the purpose of this blog and my underlying philosophy of accessibility. The first thing to remember is making a website or application accessible to vision impaired users is just good practice it improves usability for all users regardless of disability. The internet of things is upon us whether we like it or not, this means that more and more tasks in our daily lives will require the use of mobile based applications, although many of these devices will be able to be voice controlled which will help greatly. However this ubiquitous technology will be operated it still needs to be accessible. To conclude you should not think of accessibility as a tax, but as something you do because it is the right thing to do, It benefits the entirety of your user base they gain benefit from it.  This is only the start I will discuss different aspects of accessibility in later posts
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