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Social Media Accessibility Best Practices

Social media has become a daily part of professional and personal lives. SUNY Cortland encourages the use of social media as a way to promote programs and activities. Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and others help inform students, employees, alumni and fans of events and newsworthy information. It is a fantastic way to connect and engage audiences.

If you haven’t already, register your social media site.

Making Social Media Accessible

These tools that we have come to use and love are often equally important to a person with a disability. According to the Office of Civil Rights, since the College maintains various social media accounts, it is our responsibility to make the posted content accessible and in compliance with Web Consortium Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0, Level A and AA.

General

  1. All Cortland social media must comply with all applicable College policies and guidelines, including but not limited to:
    • The Communication Guide
    • Information Resources policies
    • Human Resources policies
  2. Include contact information on your social media account page. List a primary phone number and email address where users can reach your office or provide a link to your website that lists the appropriate contact information.
  3. Make your social media content available through more than one channel. Provide easy points of entry for more information. Most social media sites allow embedding of widgets on your website.
  4. Keep it simple. When possible, write in plain language, limit your use of hashtags, abbreviations and acronyms. When writing hashtags, use CamelCase — capitalizing the first letters of compound words as in #CortlandPride.
  5. Alternative Text. Adding alternative text or descriptions ensures that people with visual impairments will understand what is going on in the image. The text should be brief, but informative. Each social site has a different method for describing images.
  6. Learn the accessibility requirements and periodically test your content for accessibility.

Facebook Best practices

  • Include descriptive text when you post a photo.
  • Add a caption file, Facebook’s auto-captions, or use YouTube’s captioning services for Facebook videos.
  • Avoid using acronyms in your posts.

Alt text

Automatic alternative (alt) text is a feature that uses object recognition technology to create a description of a photo for those who are blind or have visual impairments. Learn how to edit the alt text for photo. As of the writing of this document, alt text can be edited only on a computer.

Descriptive text

Add descriptive text to the photos that are posted on Facebook. Good descriptive text can both explain and enhance the meaning of the picture. Avoid extraneous textual information in images.

Video captioning

There are two options for adding captions to videos on Facebook: pages can automatically add captions or a SubRip Subtitle (SRT) may be uploaded.

Accessibility updates 

For more information on accessibility features on Facebook and to stay updated with new ones, visit the Accessibility page on Facebook.

Twitter

Twitter and photos

Twitter allows image descriptions to be added to images in a tweet, but the feature needs to be turned on in your settings on Twitter.

Navigate to Settings and privacy > Accessibility > and turn on Compose image descriptions. 

You will now have the option to add descriptions when posting an image.

Best practices

  • Add descriptions: After enabling image descriptions, select the image when composing a tweet to add the descriptive text. The limit is 280 characters.
  • When tweeting a hyperlink, indicate whether it leads to [AUDIO], [PIC], or [VIDEO].
  • Place mentions and hashtags at the end of your tweets.
  • Capitalize the first letter of each word in a hashtag — #CortlandPride vs. #cortlandpride.
  • Avoid using acronyms.

Instagram

Best practices

  • Use the post description area to include alternative text to images and to add a transcription of video posts.
  • At this time, Instagram does not offer captioning. If you post a video on Instagram, include a link to a captioned version.

YouTube

All videos should have closed captions and, if applicable, audio descriptions. Additionally, a transcript can be helpful for those with both visual and hearing impairments.

YouTube automatically captions many videos, but the transcript should always be checked to make sure it is accurate.

If YouTube does not automatically caption your videos, it may be because:

  • The video is too long.
  • The audio quality is poor.
  • The speech from multiple speakers

Learn more about video accessibility in SUNY Cortland’s Policy for Official Video.

Snapchat

Best practices

  • Organize your snaps so that they make sense to all users.
  • Use the larger text option for captions.
  • Make sure there is good contrast and balance between the background and the captions.

 

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