Social Media Accessibility
Making Your Social Media Content Accessible
General tips
- Provide additional ways to contact your organization such as a phone number, email or contact form in your profile.
- Always put your main content first and put hashtags and @mentions at the end of a post.
- Use CamelCase for hashtags. This helps people reading visually and allows Assistive Technology to pronounce the hashtag properly.
- Avoid the use of uncommon acronyms and abbreviations. This can make content hard to understand.
- If you are linking to a PDF document, make sure the document is tagged properly and accessible.
Some additional best practices can be found: Creating Accessible Social Media Content - Disability:IN
Closed Captioning
All videos uploaded to social media sites must have captions (closed or open). Most social media now provide automatic captioning. Review your captions to ensure they are accurate and follow advice on the social media sites to ensure your content is accessible. This is critical for deaf users, however research on social media video consumption shows a significant amount is consumed without audio.
Image alt text
Follow best practices in creating accessible image alt text. Some additional information may be available and associated with the specific social media you are using.
- If there are any images with words, ensure all words are included in the text of your post. Short general description of the image can then be used for the alt text.
- Images of specific people should use their name as the alt text
- Images of groups of people at an event can be simplified: 'attendees of (event name)', or 'attendees of (event name) doing (activity)'.
For certain situations, it can be helpful to provide a full description of the image, and you can add additional details if preferred.
Image Description
Image description is separate from alt text. Occasionally an image will be posted that there are salient details someone may be interested in such as names of specific people in the image, or specific actions happening. Image Description should augment alt text, and should point out details that might be important to other people. These are traditionally located at the bottom of posts and provide clarification as to what the poster is communicating with the image.
Image Description example:
alt text: Steve Smith's graduation photo
image description: ID: Steve Smith is standing in his academic regalia in front of the E in the Go Beach sculpture near Maxson Plaza. The A of the sculpture is topped by a giant graduation cap. Behind the B, a person in a blue patterned shirt is walking by.
Specific Social Media advice
Facebook: Creating Accessible Content
For more information on accessibility techniques in Facebook, see Facebook Accessibility portal.
X, Formerly Twitter
Advancing Accessibility on Instagram
Additional information on Instagram Accessibility | Instagram Help Center
YouTube
Add subtitles & captions - YouTube Help
Audio Description - If your video has significant activity that is not voiced, it may require audio description. Audio Description includes a description of any actions on the screen and any text written on the screen. Audio description is not supported by YouTube Directly, however there are alternatives:
- you can upload a second video with an audio description track overlaid on the video and linked from the description,
- use a service such as echolabs or verbit,
- or use an overlay service like YouDescribe.
