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 as you might think, there are two main methods, include a .srt file when uploading the video or the easier option is to upload the video to YouTube first and then ad caption there.
Emojis
Use them sparingly, as screen readers say the emoji name for every instance, this can, therefore, get rather tedious.
Useful links
Elaboration on platform-specific techniques - https://accessibility.umn.edu/tutorials/accessible-social-media
How to create .srt file - https://www.speechpad.com/captions/srt
How to upload subtitles to Youtube - https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/2734796?hl=en
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 as you might think, there are two main methods, include a .srt file when uploading the video or the easier option is to upload the video to YouTube first and then ad caption there.
Emojis
Use them sparingly, as screen readers say the emoji name for every instance, this can, therefore, get rather tedious.
Useful links
Elaboration on platform-specific techniques - https://accessibility.umn.edu/tutorials/accessible-social-media
How to create .srt file - https://www.speechpad.com/captions/srt
How to upload subtitles to Youtube - https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/2734796?hl=en
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