Social Media Accessibility

• From an accessibility perspective, poor color contrast impacts the readability of your content, especially for individuals with low vision. From a marketing perspective, contrast helps your content stand out to end users. Resources are provided below:

• • Additional Information:
    • Colors and Social Media Images opens a new window (Doyouspeakfreedom.com)
    • Contrast and Color Accessibility opens a new window (WebAIM)

• • Tools to help with testing color contrast:
    • Colour Contrast Analyser opens a new window (Paciello Group)
    • Colorblinding opens a new window (Chrome Extension)

Using color alone to identify or emphasize important information could impact individuals with visual challenges (i.e., low vision, colorblindness).

In this example, the US, Canada, and Germany are identified by color alone.

Using the same chart, now color, line type (i.e., dashed, solid), and labels are used to distinguish between the different countries.

Screen readers will actually read emojis out loud for individuals who are unable to see them (e.g., smiling face, angry face, smiling face with glasses, etc.). Using multiple emojis in one message or placing the most important information after a series of emojis may result in screen reader users bypassing the message altogether.

Resources are provided below:

• How Do People with Visual Impairments Use Emojis? opens a new window (Veronica with Four Eyes Blog)

Social media platforms like Facebook and LinkedIn actually offer you the ability to upload video along with a separate captions file (i.e., .SRT file). Other platforms (e.g., Twitter, Instagram, etc.) will allow you to share video, but you will need to burn the captions into the video before uploading it (i.e., open captions).

Additional Resources:

• Creating Accessible Multimedia Content
• VEED.io opens a new window (can generate auto-subtitles)
  • VEED.io offers a quick and easy way to produce burned-in captions for short video clips. The free account allows you to creating burned-in captions for clips less than 10-minutes, but videos are watermarked with VEED.io. An upgraded account allows for removal of the watermark and the ability to work with longer video content. You can then upload the video clips directly to any social media platform.

For short clips it may be possible to place the transcript in the post. For longer recordings, provide a link to a copy of the transcript.

Additional resources:

• Otter.ai opens a new window
  • The basic account is free and offers up to 600 free minutes of transcription per month. The transcription also attempts to break down the audio by speaker. Transcribe your audio, host it on your website or web server, and share the link along with the audio recording on your social media account.

• Transcribe using Voice Typing in Google Docs opens a new window
  • For short clips, this is another option for creating a quick transcript.
    • Open up Google Docs.
    • Go to Tools>Voice Typing.
    • Select the appropriate speaker language (e.g., English/US) and the start speaking. (NOTE: You also play the audio from your recording, loud enough for the microphone to pick up the speech and transcribe it.)

Audio description or descriptive video is basically a narrator describing what is happening visually in a movie or video clip to individuals with visual impairments. This is typically needed when it is difficult to understand what is happening from the audio alone.

Additional information: 

• Guidance coming soon…

Screen reading applications read each character when it encounters a URL. Whenever possible, use services like TinyURL opens a new window and Bitly opens a new window to shorten URLs used in your social media posts.