Making your social media posts accessible

Reading Time: 2 minutes

To reach your audience, make sure everyone can access your posts.

colourful ceramic letters forming the words: Social Media — Photo by Merakist on Unsplash

Alt text

All your pictures (including diagrams) should have an Alt text (alternative text) which will be read by a screen reader for users who can’t see them.

Here how to do this:

When you add a GIF, describe it [in square brackets]

If you are using HootSuite: some advices.

A good link to understand more about alt text and how to do a good one. And a longer guidance.

Capitalise your Hashtags

Capitalising the first letter of each words on hashtags improves readability for screen reader users.

For example: #ThisIsHowtoFormatAnAccessibleHashtag

Caption your videos and multimedia

Advice from the Paciello group

Emoji

Try not to use them too much. They are read aloud by screen readers. For example: 😃 would become “smiley face emoji”.

And don’t put them in your Twitter display name.

‘Cute’ text

This is read letter by letter by screen readers and you hear ‘mathematical’ a lot. So don’t use it!

Here is an example of how it sounds:

You 𝘵𝘩𝘪𝘯𝘬 it's 𝒸𝓊𝓉ℯ to 𝘄𝗿𝗶𝘁𝗲 your tweets and usernames 𝖙𝖍𝖎𝖘 𝖜𝖆𝖞. But have you 𝙡𝙞𝙨𝙩𝙚𝙣𝙚𝙙 to what it 𝘴𝘰𝘶𝘯𝘥𝘴 𝘭𝘪𝘬𝘦 with assistive technologies like 𝓥𝓸𝓲𝓬𝓮𝓞𝓿𝓮𝓻? pic.twitter.com/CywCf1b3Lm
— Kent C. Dodds 🌌 (@kentcdodds) January 9, 2019

Hashtags and mentions should go at the end

The symbols # and @ are said aloud by screen readers, so it makes it harder to understand your post. Add them after your text. It will be clearer.

Avoid writing words or text in all Caps

It’s harder for everyone to read. The ‘shape’ of a word help us to identify it and this is lost with capitals. It can be misinterpreted by screen readers as well.

DON’T DO THIS

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