Celebrate ADA @ 31!

Today we recognize the 31st anniversary of the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). But there is still more work to be done to ensure people of all abilities have access to information. Here are some tips for marketers from @AlexaHeinrich to improve the accessibility of our social media.

• Add alt text. This is probably the most important tip I can give when it comes to making your content accessible for blind and low vision users. Alt text is a physical description of the image(s) you post that an assistive device like a screen reader will pick up and say aloud to a user. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Pinterest all allow you to write custom alt text for your posts, which is preferred to auto-generated alt text.
• Camel Case your hashtags. If you have a compound hashtag, capitalize the first letter in each word. So instead of #womeninmarketing it would be #WomenInMarketing. Capital letters, spaces, and punctuation help assistive devices and programs identify the separating words, allowing them to say compound hashtags correctly and not as one amalgamated word. You may also see this method called Pascal Case or Title Case.
• Caption your videos. This should already be something we all do since captioning has been a standard best practice for years now. Whether you do closed captions (can be turned on and off) or open captions (permanently on, burned into the video), captions make your video content more accessible and more marketable since a majority of internet users watch videos with the sound off. You can easily do closed captioning through YouTube by editing the auto-captions they generate for your video or add open captions through apps like MixCaptions, Clips, Clipomatic, AutoCap, Kapwing, and Threads.
• Use emojis smartly and strategically. Every emoji has a description assigned to it. This means it's usually better to put any emojis at the end of your posts and tweets to avoid their description making the rest of your content confusing for screen reader users. Sadly, this means that emojis as bullet points are probably not a good idea. If you want to double-check the description of an emoji, check out emojipedia.org.
• Don't use alternative characters. I know it's super popular to use external websites to generate fancy look fonts for digital content, but those alternative characters can't always be read by assistive devices. Usually, they get skipped or turned into indistinguishable noises. It's best to stick to the fonts and formatting options already available on a platform. Forcing a font or style onto a platform can cause accessibility issues. 𝐈 𝐦𝐞𝐚𝐧 𝐝𝐨𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐬𝐭𝐮𝐟𝐟 𝐥𝐢𝐤𝐞 𝐭𝐡𝐢𝐬.

Time to audit our communications!

#ADA2021 #DisabilityPrideMonth #DisabilityAwareness #DisabilityInclusion

Image Credit: ADA National Network (adata.org)