From the course: Digital Accessibility for the Modern Workplace

Tips for more accessible social media

From the course: Digital Accessibility for the Modern Workplace

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Tips for more accessible social media

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- Every second, 6,000 tweets are posted. Two million posts, articles, and videos are published on LinkedIn every day. Social media is how we stay connected. Three people get hired on LinkedIn every minute. It's where you create your personal brand. Now, what if you're excluded, not by the platform, but by the content? Well, that's what happens every second of every day, but there are things we can all do to help make social media more accessible. Here are my top tips to creating accessible social media posts. Wherever possible, describe images. Most platforms have an option to add image description, or provide alt, alternative text. Simple rule here. Describe the meaning being conveyed by the photo. Take a minute to think of the last meme you posted. Now describe it. If there is no alt text option, just write the description right there in the post. Second, add captions to video. You have two options here. First, you can it hold yourself to camera with an auto-generating captions app. Clips on iOS is great. Clipomatic does a great job. AutoCap on Android is also another option. These burn the captions onto the video. You have the option to edit before you hit save. The second option might be to upload a subtitle file. LinkedIn offers this feature. Generate your file in Microsoft Stream, or on YouTube from any video. Make your edits. Save as an SRT file, and upload. Finally, use CamelCase on all hashtags. This is a super simple habit to get into, and it came from the coding world where developers were reading long strings of code. Whenever you see a long word, that makes no sense, it normally has a hashtag next to it. Use capital letters at the start of each word. This is actually more accessible twice. Not only will you make it easier for a person with dyslexia to read it, but all screen readers being used by people who are blind will speak the words distinctly. Pretty cool, eh?

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