Five Easy Tips for Social Media AccessibilityPhoto of Mindy Johnson

Mindy Johnson

LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/mindyjohnson
Email: johnson.mindy@gmail.com

Make Your Posts More Inclusive: Five Tips for Accessible Social Media
ISTE Live 2020 featured virtual creator lab session recording

For a fabulous overview and a deeper dive into many of these best practices and more, see the Accessible Social site from Alexa Heinrich.

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Social Media Accessibility: Plain Language represented by a speech bubble, CamelCase Hashtags represented by a hashtag symbol, Image Descriptions represented by an icon of three people in a frame, Captioning & Audio represented by closed captioning & audio description icons, and Link Shorteners represented by the WWW abbreviation. | Mindy Johnson @min_d_j CC-BY-NC-ND

Plain Language

Acronyms and abbreviations are everywhere. For less character-sensitive social media, consider spelling out acronyms and abbreviations where possible. It’s also important to avoid jargon and insensitive, outdated, or biased language. Plain language not only increases the cognitive accessibility of your posts but creates a more welcoming and inclusive tone for your followers.

CamelCase Hashtags

CamelCase (or PascalCase) is the practice of capitalizing the first letters of words in multiple-word hashtags. This helps screen readers distinguish the separate words in a hashtag and increases legibility for sighted people.

Image Descriptions

Most social mobile and web applications allow you to add descriptions to your images before you post them or edit auto-generated image descriptions before you post them. When you can’t describe using alt text (e.g., GIFs on some platforms), include the image description in the post itself. Remember, a screen reader can’t read the text in images!

Captioning & Audio

Make sure the videos you’re linking to have real (not auto) captions. If you’re creating videos, make sure to caption them before posting. It’s super easy! And if you want to go the extra mile for accessibility, include audio descriptions in your video. Or better yet, before you create your video, make sure there are no elements in the video that require visual-only input. For example, read any text in your video aloud. Planning is always more elegant than retrofitting.

Captioning

Audio Description

Link Shorteners

Link shortening services not only save you characters in your posts, but they help limit the raw characters a screen reader has to read aloud. Customizing your short links can also help sighted followers remember the links you post. Putting URLs at the end of your posts is also good practice.

More Resources

Social media tools and apps change daily. Unfortunately, we can’t always keep up with each platform, but general accessibility guidance and awareness can help us make our posts (wherever we post) more accessible for our followers.

Accessibility Hubs