Social Media Accessibility

On this page:

• Social Media Best Practices
• Common Platform Instructions

Follow these guidelines to ensure social media posts are accessible and inclusive.

Social Media Best Practices

Plain Language

Plain language helps readers:

1. Find what they need.
2. Understand what they find.
3. Use what they find.

Review plain language best practices.

Tips for using plain language in social media:

• Start with the most important information.
• Use short, clear sentences. Avoid run-on sentences.
• Choose common words with basic, direct meanings.
• Avoid ableist language such as “lame” or “that’s crazy”.
• Avoid clickbait, vague statements, or unncessary details.
• Spell out acronyms and initialisms.
• Use a link shortener (bit.ly or tinyurl) when appropriate.
• Including #Hastags and @mentions in the middle of a sentence can be confusing. Consider placing them at the end of your post.

Emojis and Hashtags

Screen readers and many text to speech programs can read out unicode emoji graphics. However, text based emoticons created by combining slashes, colons, paranthesis, etc. are read out as their individual symbols.

Even with accessible emoji graphics, use them sparingly. Consider that 🙂🙂🙂🙂 is not only visually obtrusive, a screen reader will read “smiley face smiley face smiley face smiley face.”

Do: 🙂

Don’t: 🙂 or 🙂🙂🙂🙂

Place emojis at the end of sentences instead of the middle.

In addition to considerate emoji use, avoid:

• Leetspeak/Calculator spelling such as “80t5” in place of “bots”
• Text emoticons such as >:(
• ASCII art such as (^._.^)~
• Studly Case such as pReSsBoOkS

Hashtags

When adding hashtags use Pascal case by capitalizing the first letter of each word. This makes hashtags more accessible to screen readers and text to speech software. Without Pascal case, hashtags are read as one long, incomprehensible word. Pascal case also allows visual readers to easily differentiate words in the hashtag.

Do: #LangaraCollege #ThisIsTheBestWayToTypeAHashtag

Do not: #langaracollege #thisisnotagoodhashtagandhardtoread

Alt Text

Alt text should provide a concise description including the essential information about the image. Consider how you would describe the image to someone over the phone. Machine-generated alt text is becoming more common, but is rarely accurate or useful; review and edit machine-generated alt text.

Read more about alt text in the Alternative Text chapter of this Pressbook. Review the instructions for relevant platforms below.

Use descriptive hyperlink text. Review the link best practices outlined earlier in this book.

Closed Captions

Most social media platforms offer automatic captioning. Automatic captions are rarely more than 80% accurate, but are a good place to start. Use automatic captioning and edit manually to improve accuracy.

Read the captioning chapter of this Pressbook for best practices.

Common Platform Instructions