When people hear about “web accessibility,” most generally think exclusively of websites. However, web accessibility also applies to social media. So how do you make your social media presence more inclusive and accessible?
Special note: Thank you, Jamie Shields for inspiring this post. Jamie is on Twitter @JamieShieldsVI and on LinkedIn @ShieldsJamie. His website is That Thing Called Inclusion.
Tone of voice
I struggle with this one, personally. My lexicon is primarily southernisms (“I’m on top of it like polka dots on a ladybug”). That being said, it’s important to ensure your social media posts are as readable and understandable as possible. The standard for universal readability is about a 9th-grade reading level (in America, that is a high school Freshman, age 14-ish).
Sometimes social media posts are unavoidably complex, and that’s OK. For example, if you primarily tweet about tech, legal information, or medical data, then yeah your posts will be filled with complex terminology. So I’m not trying to suggest your posts should ALWAYS be at a 9th-grade reading level. But while it is sometimes unavoidable, readability should still be kept in mind.
It’s also important to avoid overusing acronyms, initialisms, and abbreviations. It’s frustrating for everyone when a post is filled with unidentified acronyms that require constant Googling just to understand a simple Tweet (eg, “TIFU. I DCd my ads and lost my CPCs. DAE use this CMS? Looking for some BTS and for someone to ELI5. Mad AF”). The assumption is always that “everyone understands” these abbreviations which violates one of the golden rules of accessibility: making assumptions about your audience. You may find yourself retaining more followers by avoiding acronyms instead of forcing them to keep Urban Dictionary bookmarked just to browse your content.
Hashtags
Hashtags are key for making your social media posts more visible by getting them searchable by relevant audiences. That being said, even hashtag formatting can negatively affect user experience.
Some hashtags are notoriously difficult to read, especially if they’re long (#thisiskindalongforsomereasonmaybeitsajokehashtagimnotsure). And believe it or not, screen readers can read hashtags, also. But they may get the words mixed up if they’re not proper camel case (which could potentially turn into an embarrassing Tobias Fünke situation, #ArrestedDevelopment #theanalrapist).
Be in the habit of CamelCasing your hashtags, which will allow screen readers to read them properly and make them more readable for your viewers. ThisIsMuchEasierToRead thanthisis.
Fonts
As we discussed in my previous post, Tips for making your social media display name more accessible, font generators are notorious inaccessible.
𝕎𝕙𝕚𝕝𝕖 𝕥𝕙𝕖𝕤𝕖 𝕞𝕒𝕪 𝕝𝕠𝕠𝕜 𝕝𝕚𝕜𝕖 𝕣𝕖𝕔𝕠𝕘𝕟𝕚𝕫𝕒𝕓𝕝𝕖 𝕃𝕒𝕥𝕚𝕟 𝕝𝕖𝕥𝕥𝕖𝕣𝕤, 𝕥𝕙𝕖𝕪’𝕣𝕖 𝕒𝕔𝕥𝕦𝕒𝕝𝕝𝕪 𝕟𝕠𝕥 Unicode alt text: While these may look like recognizable Latin letters, they’re not. They’re Unicode characters which means they’re part of a dictionary of web characters used to ensure universal translations. They actually have programmatic meanings, and they’re almost never (I’m talking 99.9% of the time) programmatically the letter they look like. So if a screen reader reads these at all, it will likely be a mathematical sequence, Greek, or symbol sequences. Most of the time though, screen readers ignore these characters completely. And many users will have difficulty reading them as they tend to be 𝒸𝓊𝓇𝓈𝒾𝓋𝑒 cursive, 𝕺𝖑𝖉 𝕰𝖓𝖌𝖑𝖎𝖘𝖍 Old English, or just completely f̵̝̗̙̭̼͖̪̳̒͂̏̃̈̐̾̌ū̷̢̯̬͚̣͙̅̓̾̓͜ͅc̷̨̝̥̠͖͎͎̼̅͒̈́͆̅͂̾̾̌͘͜ͅk̵̛͈̪̝̼̎̈́̽̀̈́̍̿e̶̥̜̮̞̳͇̬̳̊̿̿̂ͅd̴͔͝ ̵͍̯̗̈́̓͊̊̆̆͂̉͠ͅȕ̶̖͔͈̾̐̾̍p̷̨͚͉̽̎̿̊̂̉͒̊̚ fucked up.
Font generators should be avoided completely to ensure your posts are inclusive and reach as broad of an audience as possible.
Videos
It’s not uncommon to share videos on social media. But not everyone can hear these videos, like those who are deaf or hard of hearing. However, this affects more users than those who may have a hearing impairment. Like me! My phone volume is always at zero. I hate random things blaring at me or random quirky sound effects while scrolling Twitter. And I tend to primarily browse on my phone while sitting in a waiting room or in line at the grocery store (and I think people who use phone volume for entertainment in public spaces are rude). So if a video I land on doesn’t have captions, I just keep on scrolling. And I know I’m not the only one.
However, my experience is voluntary. If I wanted to watch a captionless video that badly, I could bring it up later with volume. For those who are deaf or hard of hearing though, captionless videos mean these users can’t absorb this information at all. By not captioning videos (or providing a link to a transcript), you’re excluding a huge audience of users. So before you share a video, ensure captions are enabled.
Emojis
Emojis are a good way to set a tone. They can make ominous text (“We need to talk”) more clear in their intentions (“We need to talk 🤣”). And fortunately, emojis are generally screen reader accessible! However, while emojis have a programmatic name, they’re often used excessively or in a way that people have socially identified as meaning different than the literal sense of the emoji. For example, 💀 and 😭 are frequently added to funny posts as a way to emphasize “I’m dead [from laughter]” or “I’m crying [from laughter].” But it’s a skull and the sad crying emoji. NVDA reads the skull as… well… “skull.” And the crying emoji is “loudly crying face.” While this example could retain the context of a funny post, it won’t always be the case.
Excessive emojis should also be avoided. While sighted users can “read” emojis quickly by scanning them, a screen reader user has to sit and listen to each description. Sometimes the description is short (like our previous example, “skull”), but sometimes they can be quite long (like 🤣, which is read as “rolling on the floor laughing.” So if you have a Tweet followed by 🤣🤣🤣🤣, a screen reader will literally read “rolling on the floor laughing rolling on the floor laughing rolling on the floor laughing rolling on the floor laughing.”). So be cognisant of a person’s time and ask yourself if ten duplicate emojis are really necessary.
Another trend is replacing entire words with emojis. “I went 🛍️ today and got my 💅and 💇♀️done. Feeling fierce, can’t wait to show off my 👚👖👒💍!” A screen reader would read that as “I went shopping bags today and got my nail polish and woman getting haircut done. Feeling fierce, can’t wait to show off my woman’s clothes jeans woman’s hat ring!” While this is a very basic example, it still loses some of its context if you wanted to just imply “outfit.”
To access emojis, Windows users can simply press “ctrl + ;” on their keyboard (for Mac, it’s “Command+Control+Spacebar”). It’s a little annoying to navigate on a keyboard, but when you focus on an emoji or when a mouse user hovers over an emoji, a tooltip will appear showing its title. That is what screen readers will announce when they read an emoji out loud. So just be cognisant of emojis, a users time, and what that emoji actually means.
Images
Just like on a website, image alt text is imperative. And since images make up a huge portion of social media posts, ensuring your images have alt text is the only way to ensure they’re reaching as many people as possible.
The purpose of alt text is creating an image description for visually impaired users that allows them to have the same context a sighted user would have (which is helpful to keep in mind when writing it). This also increases your SEO as alt text is considered additional content. It’s extremely important to include alt text on all of your social media posts that contain images. On Twitter, you do this by clicking “Add Description” below an image (or gif) you’re adding to your Tweet.
Twitter has a 1000 character limit for alt text, but generally, you want to keep it under 300 characters (there are exceptions, of course).
Alt text in and of itself is an art and can actually help you critique your own content. If you’re struggling to describe your image, maybe its purpose isn’t what you had in mind. Meg “Memi” Miller has a great webinar on writing alt text: The Alt Scene: When and How to Write Alternative Text (transcript available on the page).
2024 Update for Bluesky users: When uploading an image, there is an “Add Alt” button in the upper-left-hand corner of the image that pops up a modal to provide alt text. Additionally, you can go to “Settings” and “Accessibility” a tick the option for “Require alt text before postings” so you don’t forget. This way you can include everyone in your gif reactions, art work, and slice of life media uploads!
And no, I’m not even going to bother updating “Twitter” to “X”.
In conclusion…
I know many content creators are tired of hearing the word “accessibility.” But it’s extremely important and only helps your business, organization, or influence by making your content more available to a broader audience.
Thank you again, Jamie Shields, for giving me permission to retrofit his content. Jamie is on Twitter @JamieShieldsVI and on LinkedIn @ShieldsJamie. His website is That Thing Called Inclusion. Jamie put out a great social content checklist infograph on Twitter. I have an a11y-cats branded version which is available for download:
Download: Accessible Content Checklist for Social Media (PDF, 161kb). Note: As of this moment, this PDF is untagged which I plan on remediating soon.